Travel and Cold Weather

It Gets Late Early Around Here

Collars up and candles blazing

I can’t take credit for the title, that’s Yogi Berra I think. He was a catcher for the New York Yankees back in the day, then a manager, then a commentator and as each he was famous for his misquotes and malapropisms. The curious thing is that many of them made sense then and still do today.

This one was in reference to baseball, I’m sure — the fact that as the season winds on, the 7th, 8th and 9th innings that were played in daylight in June and July, by September and October are played under a dark night sky and a ball hit into the air can be more difficult to track down.

But it could also be taken to mean that our later years come a lot faster than we think they will. That youth is wasted on the young. That life is what happens when you are busy making other plans. That sort of thing. I’m not sure who said the second quote and the third is attributed to John Lennon, though he didn’t say it first.

Anyway, I am thinking of neither the realities of baseball strategy nor of getting older. Rather, I am referring to my realisation yesterday that I left my home in the morning to go to work while it was dark and when I returned home, it was dark as well. The daylight hours available to me were spent at work.

I am not the first person that lives in the northern hemisphere to come to this epiphany every year around this time. Eight hours out of twenty four of actual light has always been a reality for people living in Canada, the US, Russia and Europe. An hour of daylight savings time doesn’t really change that.

But the darkness has an impact. I had forgotten about that.

I spent the past seven winters living, working and travelling in the tropics and in fact quite close to the equator: Three years in Colombia at 4 degrees north, three more in Tanzania at 6 degrees south and one in Jamaica at 18 degrees north.

In these places, the amount of daylight is relatively even throughout the year, plus or minus about fifteen minutes. The sun goes down at six pm and comes up at 6am. You really can almost set your watch by it, literally and figuratively. The seasons are two: either rainy or dry.

So after that long away, returning to life at 49 degrees north requires a few adjustments. You need a heavy coat. You need a scarf, a toque and some gloves. Walking is done as quickly as possible, there is no leisurely pace. You have to turn your jacket collar up and scrunch up your shoulders in an attempt to touch your ears with them, so as to preserve your body heat when you go outside.

The jury is still out on whether that actually works or not, but it feels right. And no matter how long you are away, the muscle memory in this is instantaneous. It really is like riding a bike.

You can still go for a run outside, but if you do it after work, it’s likely that it will be dark. And icy. And you will need to put some serious layers on. Maybe just a fast paced walk today instead. You will still need the layers.

Everyone has different ways of dealing with this and for some it plays no role in their lives at all. I can muscle my way through it, but for me, it’s coming home after braving and battling the elements that often seem to be coming at you sideways out there, that makes it a little more endurable.

Yesterday, I had a very noticeable feeling of relief when I walked into my place. I wasn’t sure if it was the warmth, or if it was that I was no longer outside, or just the feeling of letting my shoulders relax and taking my heavy coat off and hanging it up.

Maybe it was my next move of getting out of my work clothes and into a hoodie. Maybe it was putting on the kettle, followed by the daily ritual lighting of the inferno of candles that I have. They don’t really produce warmth, unless your hand hovers directly over, but they do produce the feeling of warmth and that’s what counts. The soft light they produce lets the eyes relax too.

In the tropics, the eyes are sending signals of brightness to your conscious and subconscious brain all the time. Everything appears as varying shades on the spectrum of green and blue. The sun lights everything up. Everything is bright.

That reality does seem to transfer to the general demeanour of the people there too. Here it’s different, the sun does peek out now and again but typically, it is varying shades of grey that has to be adjusted to. And I mean that in terms of light and the general mood of the people one interacts with in public as well.

I think I had forgotten about that while living in warm places. One of the things that enabled me to wrap my brain around coming back to this part of the world was the joy of being in the cold, but of being protected against it at the same time.

It’s always struck me as a bit odd that we feel the need to do that in this country, or at least the part of it that I find myself in. It seems to me that other northern countries like Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia and the more central and eastern parts of this one celebrate the cold, welcome and embrace it as a place where life can still happen and in fact be lived fully. Here we seem to do our best to try to escape it, the increasing numbers of crazy Wim Hof cold plungers notwithstanding.

At the very least, the weather gives us something to make small talk about in the elevator on days in between hockey games.

When I returned here at the end of September, what I really wanted after so much endless travelling was to just stop moving for a while. I did wonder how long it would take me to get restless, however. Now I know the answer and I also know why so many people from here head south for a holiday.

It’s because of just how early it gets late around here.