This commentary is by Walt Amses, a writer who lives in North Calais.
On my first spring trip to Florida several years ago, I was almost apologetic, as if I betrayed some sacred commitment to the kind of suffering North Country winters often provide those of us willing to endure the deep snow and even deeper cold, indispensable if jaunts through the woods or down the slopes are your seasonal meditations.
At present, kicking back on St. Pete Beach on the Gulf of Mexico is a luxurious, guilt-free departure. I don’t think I quit winter, but it certainly feels like winter quit me.
Alpine or Nordic skiers as well as snowshoers understand exactly what I’m talking about. Winter isn’t nearly like it used to be, starting later and ending earlier than when we first migrated to these parts over 40 years ago.
In the early 1980s, we could count on a healthy snow cover by Thanksgiving most years and a couple of feet of base to see us through until early spring. It’s normal these days to find ourselves dreaming of a white Christmas, which borders on sacrilegious in a zip code where such things were a lock just a few years ago.
Last fall we had a couple of moisture-laden coastal storms that brought us mainly heavy rain, which my own meteorological theory suggests permeated the still unfrozen ground, eventually coming home to roost these past weeks in one of the worst (and most widespread) mud seasons in years, closing a number of central Vermont back roads and isolating a number of us at home.
Navigating a walk/slog circumnavigating deep ruts, dodging water-filled potholes, and traversing what felt like quicksand, I encountered a late-model SUV, in over its hubcaps, thoroughly immobilized and apparently abandoned. I made a note to look up the salvage laws.
Once we miss out on those early season snows, playing catch-up becomes incrementally more difficult as the season wears on — the sun rises higher in the sky, days get longer and nights shorter.
A case in point: Several weeks ago, we had over a foot of dry, windblown powder on a Saturday that was heavy, wet and essentially useless by Monday and gone by Wednesday. Most certainly a product of climate change, this late-season maddening unpredictability is still more an inconvenience for us while ravaging much of the rest of the world, including southern and western areas of the U.S.
Wildfire season lasts all year in much of California, and now in Texas and Colorado. Unprecedented rainfall levels lead to 100-year floods almost annually, while tornados are more devastating in both power and longevity. Tides rise to unprecedented levels all along the coasts, inundating low-lying communities in several areas nearly every time it rains heavily.
Everything seems to be falling apart — except today.
The Gulf is a shimmering green with a warm, tropical sun glinting off the gentle waves as an endless variety of freshly basted human flesh parades by in a beach ritual that likely began when the primary risks were hungry plesiosaurs stalking the shallows.
While my wife and friends joined the parade, sporadic sleep left me weary enough to beg off, content to perch for a while, amid swooping gulls, laughing children and, for the first time in months, weather conditions that do not verge on life-threatening. I find this all quite acceptable.
Later, as I slip into the water, which I’m told is cooler than usual, I find it well warmer than the Vermont ponds I frequent all summer long and, due to the salt content, with enough buoyancy to levitate me into a restful float, staring at wisps of cirrus “mare’s tails” high above, moving languidly with the waves, the very heartbeat of the planet.
With a couple of para-sailers the only interruption of the long, emerald horizon, I marvel at the modern world’s ability to deposit me on this beautiful, miles-long strip of white quartz mere hours after our bone-jarring ride over frozen ruts that almost ended this trip before it began.
Being on a beach like this is almost surreal. This sudden appearance of midsummer in early April is an unnerving proposition. I find losing myself on a crowded beach is easy, though, with every other beach of my life sticking its nose under the tent with sand and sea a consistent enough metaphor to weave a sandy panorama in different places with a variety of companions over the years.
Beginning in childhood, the Jersey Shore was ours, well before it became “The Jersey Shore” and an object of national ridicule. Girls would grease up with a concoction of baby oil and iodine and lie in the sun all day. I forget how this was supposed to accomplish anything good.
Although I’m on the No. 1 beach in the country according to Trip Advisor, my mind takes me to the outer reaches of Cape Cod, North Truro: sitting around a bonfire in late October, a blanket of stars reaching out into the Atlantic where ancient mariners fell off the edge, never to return, as we fight the chill, trying to squeeze every last moment out of a fading summer.
The best thing about this short trip is that, when we get home, spring and summer are still ahead and we certainly anticipate those incredibly perfect, post-mud, pre-black fly afternoons.
But not quite yet. I’m too busy watching a little boy running back and forth, near as I can tell attempting to dump the Gulf of Mexico into a hole he and his slightly older brother dug in the sand, one bucket at a time. He’s ecstatic, with a huge, infectious smile plastered over his face as he attends to his task. There’s not a frustrated bone in his body. I believe he will succeed, if only his parents don’t have to get back to real life, which the beach decidedly is not.
Of course it’s not — that’s why we’re here, isn’t it?
