Thursday in North America

Notes from Montana, eyes on the world.

It’s Thursday in North America. Friday-eve as my wife and I joke. Pre-friday. In the early dark hours of the morning we had a rare winter glimmer of stars and moon, a light in the darkness of winter night. It’s sort of rare here. We live in a valley that sees a lot of inversion. Inversion that leads to mental inversion by the end of winter, but sanity comes in the form of infrequent clear skies.

So when I woke up to my wife’s alarm, crept down the stairs in the dark while she stayed in bed, I paused in the stairwell to peer out the window, and to my pleasant surprise there were lights in the sky, ever so faint, but there. Stars were the first giveaway. A cold sparkle on the eastern mountain horizon across the valley. The moon’s glow, somewhere behind the western ridge behind the house made the snow covered valley floor bright. And ever so faint in the east, the blue glow of an impending sun. A rare winter clear morning.

What is odd is that just outside this valley there are plenty of places that get sunshine all the time. But from Missoula, north to Whitefish, we often get socked in. (I keep tabs with a friend up there… we compare/contrast the weather like old men on the phone over afternoon coffee while playing fetch in our respective yards with our respective dogs. And from his report, though I find it hard to believe, they are socked in sometimes more than we are.)

As I paused on the stair landing looking out the window, I felt something shuffle by my feet. Acre was in his bed (one of many, this one on the landing, because we built a low window, just for such a creature even though when we built the house, we had no dog… we knew if we did one day they would love this feature, and alas, so much so that he has a bed that lives here now) and moving around just to get my attention for some pets. I sat a moment scratching his head and rubbing his eyes before descending further into the downstairs darkness where I lit the fire, switched on a low light, and began making coffee. This being my reoccurring ritual throughout the winter months, broken only in the summer by lack of lighting a fire.

Fire now going, I carry one cup to my bride, then descend again to sit by the fire, now joined by Acre who has moved to one of his other beds, this one near the stove.

As I pick up my County Highway I pause and look out the window. There are still stars hanging starkly in the darkness, but now a faint warmth has built into the translucent blue, creating a glow behind the shadowed silhouettes of the trees that stand between the house and the far horizon, which is made from the soft slope of the mountain across the valley. The glow is growing. A whisper of a cloud hints at the incoming and growing light that lurks behind the earth and is heading this way. I set my coffee beside me, open the pages, and read, periodically looking over the top so I can see out the window into the faintly growing light.

A side note here: The County Highway, “America’s Only Newspaper” has quickly become one of my favorite publications. In the last decade I’ve canceled every print subscription I’ve had, and the number was high at one point, because the writing became stilted, boring, shallow, and predictably underscored with the tone of an annoying babysitter. National Geographic. Harpers. The Atlantic. The New Yorker. High Country News. Outside Magazine. I’ve gotten them all in the past. I’ve cancelled them all in the last decade. I don’t know if it was because of corporate consolidation and the trend of attempting to keep up with the instant culture of the internet, but all these publications lost their value to me. And it really bummed me out. Especially Nat Geo and the New Yorker. I once loved both of those, and missed picking them up to read. I prefer analog reading. And then along comes The County Highway. Print only. No online option. Great writing. No overt agenda other than to report the world “for the rest of us,” meaning, without being centrically biased towards coastal, urban America. It’s a big country. We don’t all think the same. We never have, we never will. And it’s wild that reporting has become so biased in most corporately driven media that it assumed we not only all want the same things, but also want to be spoon fed our own thoughts so we don’t have to make decisions for ourselves on how we see the world. The County Highway tells stories their own way. No corporate agenda. And it’s wildly refreshing. As well as aesthetically pleasing. But I digress. Or maybe not. Maybe that is the point of today’s post. Regardless, moving on.

Paper unfolded before me my mind drifts across some of the shorter sections. America by numbers. 56. That is the number of hours the average American spends at traffic lights/ year.

The day unfolds slowly. Before I get behind my laptop I get on my bike and take Acre to the creek. The road and trail are hard packed ice, and my studded bike tires grip the hard surface with precision. But I still go slowly. Acre runs ahead. He knows the way. At the creek we cross a small channel, now nearly frozen over and make our way across the small island. On the other side sits a deeper swimming hole. I have to break ice with my bare feet as I walk in the cold water towards it. I can feel the blood pushing up my legs before I even sit, then as I sit, I feel my breath trying to over, but my mind steps in, and I slow it with heavy intention as I lower in up to my neck. I steady the first couple breaths as the icy water washes over me. My hands are instantly cold, and after I dunk under I pull them up above the surface and give them a little warmth from my breath. Slowly everything steadies. First my breath. Then my blood. The creek is absolutely peaceful in its lethality. How long could the human body last here? I give it three minutes and change before I stand. With each passing minute it becomes easier. Lulled by the cold. The third minute in I’m actually feeling relaxed. So drunk is this danger, but no risk in such a short notice. But I still have a bike ride home, so I stand, the water freezing to me before I get to my towel.

The last few mornings have been cold at the creek. My body is fine with it, but my fingers and toes ache with the temperatures. After I’m covered up, I slip first my boots, then my mittens on and slowly the heat returns. I pause to look around. The light has only just become full and a stroke of heavy pink lights the upstream hills to the north, the creek pouring out of it.

As I’m biking home my toes call for attention. I’m not happy about the frost bite I got back in the 90’s. I still feel it. It happened in Yellowstone, in January, I think around 95 or 96. My brother and I went winter camping, snow shoeing in a few miles from the road to watch snowshoe hares, bobcats, and whatever else winter had to show us. The first two days were beautiful. 20’s and sunny. But on our second night the temperature dropped to 20 below zero. We were prepared for cold, but not quite that cold. In the third morning I reluctantly crawled out of my sleeping bag and slid into my Sorel boots. My feet had been sweaty the day before, and I made the mistake of not putting the liners in my sleeping bag. They were frozen solid. We crawled out of our tent, and quickly realized not only was our stove frozen, but everything was frozen to a level I didn’t realize before that was imaginable. We decided to quickly pack up and work our way out. But in that kind of cold, nothing is easy, and everything takes too long.

Walking back towards the road became instantly challenging. I could feel the cold deeper than I’d ever known. Calorically low, and mentally inexperienced with this sort of situation, all I knew was that I was experiencing an intensity of temperature I’d never known. My feet and hands began to ache. Then go numb. The cold went deep into my body. I was snowshoeing with every layer I’d brought and carrying a heavy pack, a situation normally I’d be plenty warm doing, but I wasn’t warming. I was getting colder and colder. I joked that I wanted to lay down, but in the back of my mind I was increasingly concerned my body might actually make that decision without me. We vocalized the option of trying to reset up our tent and trying to get warm, but I knew for me, there was no warming without an external source at this point, so we pushed. And pushed. And after a very slow, arduous walk we finally arrived back at the road and unlocked the car and crawled in. After a nervous minute of the engine cranking reluctantly the engine did finally fire. It took nearly twenty minutes for the heat to begin to emerge. As we drove north towards Bozeman I pulled my feet from my boots and was rather horrified at the black and white coloration of the ends of both of my feet. So this is frostbite.

We stopped at a cafe in Bozeman and thought finally began to feel warm, my feet burned with pain. While I don’t get pain like that, I do get phantom tastes of it from time to time, sometimes from actual cold, sometimes even in the summer when there is nothing for them to complain about. When they say frostbite never heals, it’s not that you always feel it. But it does pop up from time to time. So I have to be careful.

Humorously the next week I was in a wilderness first aid class at the University of Montana. My feet made for a fine exhibit of what frostbite looked like, how to prevent it, and how to care for it. I was introduced to Stegar Mukluks by two of the women in the course, who had worked in the arctic. They explained to me how the Sorel is good in wet conditions, but terrible once temperatures drop well below freezing, because the foot bed is rubber, and the rubber holds the moisture, which then freezes because it can not escape. Stegar mukluks are built wide and roomy, for both insulation and air space, and made of leather that allows the moisture to escape. While no good in wet conditions, they are the ultimate in warmth below freezing.

I’ve used these ever since and while I get some cold pains from time to time, I’ve never entered the danger zone of losing toes ever since.

I use the cold water to keep myself challenged. I push into the pain to keep my mind and body alert to what the world has to offer. The world doesn’t have opinions or motives. It simply is. This is a good thing to remember when you are interacting with society. Society has motives. People have motives. But the world ubiquitous is without motive or agenda. That is my preferred company.

Sitting at my computer, I have my second coffee. I open my work day which is mostly today inside a screen. I distract myself with the news for a minute before diving in. A few hours later I do the same. And crap. David Lynch has died. I just watched Lucky the other night at a friends recommendation. A few minutes later that friend texts me. We converse about the affect David Lynch has had on us. For me, he created an aesthetic to life I long for. He could make the smallest, most easily overlooked detail a thing of beauty. A moving shadow. Evergreen limbs in the wind. The pain of loss, tragedy, he found the beauty in all of it. And always a little humor and quirkiness that reminds us to never be too serious. My friends comment from watching Lucky are as follows:

• Realism is a thing. But what you see isn’t what I see.

• At the end, when we’re left with nothing, there’s only one thing to do… Smile.

It’s Thursday in America. Friday Eve. I interlude my work day here, on Substack, because it’s a place I’m smitten with right now. I’m meeting new people, with new perspectives and new stories. Some I share, some are foreign, but it’s a place I enjoy watching for creativity. And a place I enjoy contributing.

It’s also a place I face challenge. Writing, no matter what others say, is challenging. For me it is. I do it a lot. And it still is. But not from the angle you might think. I love putting words on page. I’m good at it. The challenge comes from being honest. From trying to not hold dear my own agenda, but rather to let some deeper magic that I’m aware has the potential to come through, that is not my own, and allow it to come to pass on the page. That is what I strive for. I’m not even sure if it is something anyone else would recognize, but I do. I know when I’ve done it or not, and that is what matters. The world is ambiguous in its care for what I do, what I create, but in the end I’ll know for myself, just as I’ll know when I’ve crossed the fine line of being safe sitting in cold water. It’s easy to get lulled into complacency, and while no one else may ever know, ultimately at he end of the day, I know if I’ve tried or not. Why does this even matter? Does it?

I listened to a Huberman clip earlier in which he talks about “grit.” As a verb. There is apart of our brain that creates its. And there is a way to foster it. How? By doing hard things. No one else can tell us what that hard things is though, because what is hard for me may not be hard for you. Realism is a thing. But what you see isn’t what I see.

I love learning to lean into that grit. It’s why I set out all those years ago into the midwinter Yellowstone where I was blessed with getting to watch snowshoe hare and a bobcat for two days before pushing into the most extreme cold I’ve ever felt. It’s why I love to go sit in the cold creek every single day, even when I don’t feel like it. And it’s why I write. I love the challenge. I love the push. And ultimately it is a way to experience the world, and part of what it means to experience the world is to also share it.

It’s Friday Eve in America. The sun is out today. The sky radiant blue. My dog is snoring on the sofa now. Here’s to another day on earth.