When It's Snowing The Outdoors Seem Like A Room
I think I am trying to make a place for wonder in my life
Over the weekend it snowed in Seattle. It snowed in a lot of cities, certainly, but it was a bigger deal here than in most other places because it so rarely happens at all, and even more rarely sticks around long enough to transform the landscape.
But Friday and Sunday brought the good, heavy snow to us here, for whom winter is typically an unbroken string of wet, gray days where the sky seems twice as close to the ground as it has any right to be. Behind the snow was the sun, another rare winter gift—a sign, maybe, that things are turning, that our hope and our vitamin D levels might both soon be restored.
This being Seattle, it felt like the whole city was prepared for this moment. Not in any logistical sense, certainly; we have few plows and steep hills besides, and no one besides the transplants knows how to drive in it, and (again, this being Seattle) we ditched our road salt for sand a decade ago over environmental concerns related to river runoff and salmon habitats. But in spirit…people were ready. Snowmen littered my block, and every few houses, the print of a snow angel could be seen in the yard. (My wife and I contributed to this effort.) People cordoned off the hillier east-west side streets to sled on, and my friends up the street packed a miniature ski jump onto theirs. Couples cross-country skied in the middle of the road as though the space had been cleared just for that.
I’m not a winter sports guy but I did get to wander around out there in it with a boozy hot chocolate, so that was nice.
I read a short story the other day—Devin Murphy’s “Waiting for the Coywolf,” from The Sun Magazine—and, in the context of that snowstorm, one bit in particular leapt off the page at me.
I think I am trying to make a place for wonder in my life. Or maybe I have slipped off the deep end. Who knows?
Who knows? Nearly a year in to these uncertain times, who knows. It’s both, maybe.
Like just about everything that has happened since March of last year the joy of the snow has also thrown into sharp relief the horrifying instability and inequality of the world we live in. To call America’s infrastructure a house of cards would be an insult to the good folks at the Bicycle Corporation.
Unusual snow and ice storms in Texas, for example, have resulted in devastating rolling blackouts across the state, which—like everything except the occasional royal beheading—hit the poor and marginalized far harder than the rich. This was no freak accident, either, with power lines freezing up under a storm no one could have predicted. No, the failures are baked in!
The combined forces of capitalist profit motivation and “states’ rights”—a crock of shit that has always served to make people worse off, not better—create a perfect nightmare in situations like these.
Reading these tweets in succession makes me want to print things that would have people in dark sunglasses at my door in a few short hours.
(Lest you sprain something patting yourself on the back too hard thinking this is just a red state thing, feel free to look up all the fires that PG&E has caused in California and what’s going on with nursing homes in New York. We’re all in this together, save for the people with enough to buy their way out of caring.)
It would be nice to have something clever or poetic to say about all this but mostly I’m just choked with rage. The wanton waste of all these singular, precious lives to keep the profit machine going. The lies, and the times they don’t even bother lying to us because they know there’s nothing we can do about it. That the joy of something so simple and beautiful like a snowstorm turns to ashes in our mouths because of all the deaths of people we have the resources to take care of ten times over and don’t.
I am full of despair but I am not completely hopeless. If I were I would probably use this newsletter to encourage you to go live a fulfilling life on your own terms and try to enjoy it all while you can. But I am not, so I won’t; it becomes clearer to me with each passing day that, as a friend recently put it, what changing the world requires of us is sacrificing some of our own self-actualization for the sake of our common humanity. (And to be honest there’s plenty of self-actualization on that road, too, just maybe not of the kind you might have otherwise chosen for yourself.) I think it’s important to end these things on a high note, so here’s a story—from the New York Times, of all places—to make you feel like it’s still worth fighting.
The world needs more Bridgets—and a lot more people to realize that they have more in common with her than they ever will with the greedheads, oligarchs, and bosses they’ve been taught to admire.
Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.
-Chuck
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"Because energy prices should reflect scarcity of the supply, the market price for the energy required to serve load shed in the face of scarcity should also be at its highest." Ah, the "face of scarcity" ... why should it be a human one in that orbit?