Winter the Assassin and Warm Weather Insanity

It’s mid-March, which means many of us in the snow-producing states are all done thank you with this business of winter. Personally, I’m coping, but I am also looking forward to that first day of 2005 when a wind blows, I brace for it, and then realize that it does not contain icicles and other wince-inducing sharpness. There is nothing like a soft spring gust.

That said, I have a deep appreciation – nay, respect – for winter. First of all, I think that a world covered by a foot of snow is one of the more grin-worthy sights around. That is a topic for another time, though. More importantly, I think that winter keeps us sane.

Why? Winter in much of America is a period of months during which, as Garrison Keillor said, Mother Nature makes a pretty good attempt to kill us. Humans are not well designed to survive five degree weather, or sideways-blowing sleet, or black ice on the highway, or even a foot of snow, no matter how damn pretty it is.

I believe that, in order that winter does not kill us, we are all born with a certain internal reserve, a core of determination that helps us to not die. This reserve is called upon constantly from November through March, helping us to remember our gloves, to take the extra time to warm up our cars, and to not slide into an icy retention pond. If you are out of food but it’s ten below outside, you call on your reserve to make it to the grocery. The reserve even functions on small, practical levels: it’s what makes you put up with cold bathroom tile in the morning instead of leaping back into your warm bed and hiding until noon. Come March, that core is just about drained, and it takes all summer – barbecue, days at the pool, bare feet in the grass, sweat on the back of your knees – to build it back up again.

Of course, the Grim Reaper version of winter only affects a portion of the country. This is where we get to the sanity part. I’ve had a fair amount of contact with Winter Free parts of the country. I lived in Boca Raton for nine months. I’ve visited Miami, New Orleans, south Texas, San Diego, and L.A. I’ll even include San Francisco on the list, because they’ve really only got pretend winter there. Here’s what happens if you spend too much time in a Winter Free area: you go varying degrees of insane.

That winter-survival reserve is innate to humans (or at least to Americans – my study is not yet international), and when it doesn’t get used it builds up and explodes in all manner of personal excess and absurdity. That energy has a genetically designed purpose, but misguided, it causes people to think that valet parking at the grocery store makes sense. They decide to decorate their yellow Lamborghini with pink and blue paisleys. A third tongue stud? A ninth tattoo? Dye the pubic hair pink? Wear a thong in public? Sure, why not? Consider the disparate percentage per capita of fake breasts, Rolls-Royces, and Rolexes above and below, say, 33 degrees latitude. Consider the tendency of everyone on the entire south Florida highway system to drive either 45 or 110, but nowhere in between. Consider Oakland Raider fans. Consider Hollywood. I tell you truly, where nary a snowflake touches the ground, there lurks insanity.

This is, of course, why many old people retire on a southerly heading. Their personal reserves are permanently tapped, and Mother Nature might finally succeed in knocking them off, so they have to flee. But since the reserve is empty, they can exist in the warm climate without exhibiting any symptoms of insanity, at least none different from their northern counterparts (inflexibility, high pants, Contract Bridge, etc.)

Ah, say you, what about mudslides, hurricanes, brush fires, earthquakes and the like? Is not Mother Nature trying pretty hard to thin the herds of Winter Free dwellers as well? Yes, but in ways that the internal reserve doesn’t address. You can’t struggle through an earthquake: either the ground will swallow you or it won’t. Fleeing a hurricane or a wind-blown brush fire doesn’t tap the reserves of inner fortitude so much as it taps the reserves of adrenaline. The months-long siege of winter is no comparison to the bipolar Blitzkrieg of sudden natural disaster.

So there you have it. If your personal reserve is called upon to survive a northern Winter, it won’t boil over and make you go berserk on you when you’re not looking. If it’s eighty degrees in January, watch out. You may already be wearing six hundred dollar sunglasses.

This isn’t to say that insanity is a bad thing, per se. We need Hollywood to be crazy and detached from reality so that they can put beautiful dreams on film without some wet blanket saying “that’s now how it would happen.” We need the guy with the pierced neck and the blue hair playing the bass fiddle on the beach because he makes things more colorful than they would otherwise be. The world would be deeply boring without the insane and partially insane. So, northerners, maybe the trick this March is to splurge a little on your reserve, cut loose, and try a bit of insane personal excess. But just a little bit. You don’t want that Easter ice storm to kill you.

-Tyler

[Endnote: I have not figured out how New York City fits into this equation. Lots of snow there, yet the place is chock-full to the gills with insane people. Any ideas?]