I was born in the month of February, and never quite got over it. As soon as I could talk, I started complaining about the weather and have never stopped. The damp chill of a northern climate has settled into my bones. All my family suffered from arthritis in winter and accepted it as fate. Heating was inadequate and unreliable, we had to cycle to school in all weathers, and when we got there, the classrooms were so cold that everyone kept their coats and gloves on. Winter was not my favorite time. If the groundhog sees its shadow today, we must expect six more weeks of winter. But I don’t need a groundhog to tell me that. I know in my bones that there will be six more weeks of winter, because that’s just how the solar system is arranged.
Despite the teasing promise of global warming, we still have to suffer through winter every year. You may have noticed last week that winter has not gone away yet. It was cold, and there’s something quite scary about a spell of really cold weather. It’s a reminder that we are living on a slightly warm ball of rock in the middle of an infinite space where the temperature is around minus two hundred and fifty degrees centigrade, just a few clicks of the thermostat above absolute zero. It felt close to absolute zero outdoors last week. A person could die in this kind of cold, and of course, people do, and did.
Human civilization began in warm, welcoming places. What madness brought us to this unpredictable latitude, where just dealing with the weather takes up so much time and money? We spend months in summer trying to stay cool at enormous expense, and waste months in winter dealing with and paying for snow and ice.
The Pilgrim Fathers must have understood their mistake soon as they landed at Plymouth Rock. Half of them died during their first winter in New England. But they stubbornly refused to make the obvious decision and head south, or even back to the moderate climate of Old England, where surely a little religious persecution would have been better than this annual meteorological persecution?
Those of us who remain in the northeast are the inheritors of the stubborn Puritan tradition that allowed these bleak latitudes to be populated in the first place. Humans are fond of inhabiting places unfit for habitation. Las Vegas, for example, is about as sustainable in the long run as a base camp on Mars. It's one of the strongest arguments I know against human rationality. Would rational creatures choose to live in Maine or Alaska or the Scottish Hebrides? They would not. A truly rational race of creatures would confine its activities between latitudes 30 North and 30 South and leave the rest of the frozen earth to the penguins and polar bears who might appreciate it more.
Just because we can live somewhere doesn’t mean that we should, any more than “All you can eat” equates with “All you should eat.” Somewhere between the possibility and the decision, common sense should intervene. It’s significant that, when people grow old and acquire wisdom, they immediately move to Florida, which makes me wonder what I’m still doing here.
