As usual at this time of year the neighborhood seems to be emptying out as our local climate refugees head south for the sunshine. If they’re not gone already they will be on their way in the next few days. Costa Rica seems to be popular this year, and the Bahamas of course, and even good old Florida although Florida has had terrible weather so far. Whatever horrors winter has in store for us in the northeast a lot of our neighbors prefer not to share the experience.
Who can blame them? Well, I can for one. Those of us who are left behind, keeping an eye on empty houses and feeding abandoned cats, can’t help feeling a certain resentment as we check our generators, stock up with salt and shovels and anticipate the discomforts and disruptions of the coming weeks. Why can’t we all go south? If a Mexican bandit can escape from a maximum security prison twice, surely we can escape from a wide-open, frozen suburb? The grass is always greener on the other side, especially if it’s not buried in snow!
The desire to run away is particularly strong in January, but it persists at a low level all year. Escape, that’s what we all dream about. We want to vanish from here and re-appear somewhere else, painlessly, without explanations or apologies. About three quarters of a million people go missing every year, and many of them are never found. They are probably all down in Costa Rica, soaking up the sunshine. But wherever they are some of them have certainly gone missing by choice. They walked away from their lives, felt the sunshine, purchased some lime green Bermuda shorts, changed their names, and vanished.
It’s the plot of a thousand novels. I was just reading one by the French writer Simenon, called The Flight of Monsieur Monde. The main character is a successful businessman with a family who, one wet, cold day in Paris, walks to his office and just keeps walking. He takes a train, to the south of course. I’ve never heard of anyone escaping to the north apart from a small sub-category of extreme masochists who go to Vermont in January. Down by the Mediterranean Monsieur Monde works in a casino and lives a completely different life for a few months before astonishing everybody by returning calmly to his home and office. He needed to escape for a while to preserve his sanity, and he did.
The sudden overwhelming desire to just go, to disappear, leave everything and start again sometimes hits people in the middle years of life when they look back, look ahead, and see more of the same. For me it’s more a matter of the weather forecast. When the forecast says snow, it’s time to go, when the forecast says ice, even Florida sounds nice.
In the long run Global Warming may save us from this annual torture, but it’s hard to be patient.
I want to join the great exodus and go south right now. Within hours I could become a lounging, sun loving climate exile with not a care in the world. Unfortunately this kind of escape, like a dramatic prison break, has a rather large price tag attached, and in any case I fear I may have left it too late. Costa Rica seems to be full.
Copyright: David Bouchier.
