Editor’s note: Walt Amses is a writer and former educator who lives in Calais.
[I]t’s difficult to overstate the psychotic nature of Vermont weather or the variety of emotions it elicits when the calendar says April, the angle of the sun says spring, while it’s snowing the kind of snow that feels more like dense rain than anything else, wetter than wet; colder than cold; and provocative enough at times to force the question: “What am I doing here?”
It appears the longer you’ve been tossing off lines like “it’s winter (or spring); it’s Vermont; get used to it,” the more likely it is that, first of all, you’re aging (who isn’t?) and consequently also more likely to examine the rational underpinnings of where you reside, how bravery equates with stupidity, and how you might briefly slink away from the elements without seeming like the complete wimp version of yourself that was always lurking right below the surface.
Depending on where you’re originally from — probably south of wherever you live now — your version of April is light years away from reality, especially if you’re anywhere north of Interstate 89 or upwards of 1,000 feet in altitude. You have friends who get away who you overtly disdain as snowbirds but secretly envy as you rationalize not leaving the house by implying you’ve been waiting for just such a day to catch up on your reading. In some north central Vermont Aprils you could probably make a case for perusing the complete works of William Shakespeare and still have time to strangle the mailman for delivering seed catalogs.
This is the time when mud engulfs cars, bears obliterate bird feeders, and skunks have babies under the front porch. May flowers don’t seem worth the trouble.
Reliably blue politically, Vermont is predictably blue in other ways as well — especially in early spring. We’re not talking about robin’s eggs either, but rather our skin tone in the first stages of hypothermia we experience walking the dog, gassing up the car, or clearing the snow around the mailbox, which has taken on the texture and weight of newly poured concrete. It’s not even because it’s all that cold, but more that our bodies and brains have expectations of April that April consistently fails to meet.
A 10 degree morning in November is a harbinger, but one we expect and accept as a small step in the implacable march toward winter as we do autumn’s first transitional ice pellets and snowflakes. Such weather in April seems more like a betrayal. We’ve not evolved to the point where the first crocus emerges when we anticipate it, especially if we we’ve emigrated from New York, New Jersey or other points south, which many (so-called) “Vermonters” have. Our looking for snapdragons in snowdrifts compounds our anguish, rendering us temporarily to a kind of metaphysical leper colony where nothing but the first exuberant, 60-degree afternoon provides the kind of solace we require; perhaps our noses won’t fall off after all.
But before that happens a certain amount of endurance is required. Losing any preconceived notions about April can be augmented by the understanding that the first of the month is not set aside for fools without reason. We play tricks on each other as if to inure ourselves to the serious chicanery of the natural world. This is the time when mud engulfs cars, bears obliterate bird feeders, and skunks have babies under the front porch. May flowers don’t seem worth the trouble.
Although things could be worse. In Longyearbyen, Norway, for instance, a town of 1,000 souls north of the Arctic Circle, residents celebrate the return of the sun on March 8 when it pops out — unless it’s cloudy — at 12:48 p.m. for 18 minutes after being AWOL since October. The payback of course is that summer this far north of Oslo is like a months-long sunny afternoon. Perfect if you can get your mind around the whole year being comprised of one enormous day.
Eventually, as it always does, this hot fudge sundae of a landscape will give way to the perfection of that greenish glow brightening the hillsides, a nocturne of peepers and loons transforming evenings, and complacency of forgetting completely about what TS Eliot called “the cruelest month” until the same time next year.
