winter doesn't exist
the absence of winters, shift in climate cycles - a solastalgia for ways we once knew
That winter all around has lost its teeth is one thing, but to lose the spark and bite of this precious season in the Scandinavian region is something that should make everyone immediately pause and think hard. It’s only my second winter here in Sweden and I’m in no way an expert on the ways in which we seem to have tossed climate and weather patterns in complete disarray in the wake of our endless greed and inexorable ignorance. But winters in Scandinavia are characterized by their inherent lack of daylight and now with the dissipation and dwindling of weather systems what we’re left with is just pitch darkness that starts around 1530 and ends at 930 during peek winter. Pitch darkness minus the freeze.
As Erica Berry wrote in her latest dispatch, there’s something particularly disturbing about the introversion winter induces in all of us. Berry writes: “Walking around my Portland neighborhood at 7 p.m. the other day, I caught one silhouette after another behind glowing windows. Everybody was home. I didn’t blame them—I love being home when it’s dark outside, just like I love the heightened introversion of winter. At the same time, I’m uneasy with the hygge-bunkers that domestic spaces become when…”
It’s after reading Berry’s words t hat I myself felt motivated to emerge from the debris of winter seclusion and write this steamy, saturated, bath-y dispatch about my own climate worries. A kind of pseudo winter ennui has taken over me these last few weeks. A kind of perpetual worry and sadness, even a variant of homesickness, for the planet that I once knew and called home. Wherever I go, read about, talk about the environment as we once collectively knew it has changed in ways I find distressing. Perhaps this is what they call solastalgia?
The days when the sun does peek on us, the city feels like it’s thawing, coming out of whatever small freeze it had experienced in the day before. Yesterday evening I sat till late at night working on something, completely oblivious to the window open next to me. This was on December 11. I checked the temperature and it was a tepid 9 degrees with more rain than anything else coming our way down the days. I cannot emphasise enough on how calamitous and deeply mournful this is.
I live in the industrial city of Gothenburg that’s perched on the south-western coast of Sweden. Winters here are in some way supposed to be dark and long and cold and freezing. Hence the whole premise of winter mys that I so desperately tried to write about last year and miserably failed. This year winter did seem to begin on a slightly more upbeat note when the region received a four hour spell of snow right in the middle of November. But days after that bout of snow melted away, there’s just been a kind of miasma-eaque whisper of winter. It doesn’t get cold, it doesn’t freeze, it doesn’t even get windy enough to keep me awake.
On most days the indoor heating is so profoundly comforting that I fall asleep immediately after lunch. I know that says more about my laziness than anything else but it lends some meaning here perhaps? In the absence of sub-zero, heck, even sub-five temperatures, all we have here is a gentle light mist on some days, a fog on others and a draughty breeze rising from the sea next doors on others. On the day the city is shrouded in a poetic, gothic mist, I try to take up to an hour-long walk in my neighbourhood, wearing my little winter light, cutting through the bends and sinews of these winding streets that make this part up.
During these walks I see people dressed in a way that’s barely reflective of the season, birds like the tit, the seagull, and the herons and storks glide by in complete disregard for the season of the moment. On my walks through the forest patch next doors, I find dabbling ducks babbling, flapping their tails and wings, as they glide across the pond as if it’s a thick summer noon.
The foliage around, meanwhile, is dense, verbose, even rich in patches, in the colour of summer. Verdant trees sway in the breeze, leaves flutter as birds fly overhead while the skies seem petulant grey. In this visual and sensoral chaos, I wander along, searching for answers in the faces of people around. On some days I want to stop my next door professor neighbour and talk to him for an hour about this season and if it’s always been this confusing. But the last time I checked, he had gone for an indoor hockey game in the middle of summer and then endless bike rides in autumn.
I think it won’t be a stretch to say that there’s a sense of the dipshit to this sticky, wet, drench-y winter which is anything but cold. Earlier this week, I came to know about the final extinction of the Snowy Owl from Sweden. Its biggest threat, researchers say, is climate change. Warmer winters that bring in more rain and far lesser snow, destroy the snow tunnels that lemmings, their primary food source, rely on to survive. Without these small rodents, the owls cannot survive. And as the Arctic warms, the landscapes Snowy Owls depend on are disappearing too.
I’m not sure how much time of others it takes up, but this rapid devolution and loss of our natural ecosystems in ways more than one all around us, causes me immense, endless grief and worry. On most days this distress trellises in the background what with the daily motions of life. It is when I kick back at the end of a day, the feeling looms over me that perhaps so much is lost. I work in the space of environment, and am 24x7 surrounded by the gloom and doom of multiple failing projects, funds lost, and most of all, an inevitable mistrust placed in this sector. But even if you don’t work in this space, that climate change is so vehemently and veritably unfolding before our naked, human eyes on a daily basis is not a tawdry secret.
The other day I went for a meal with friends and while entering the restaurant I was excited because the weather app said it will snow from 10pm onward. When we stepped out at 11, what I saw all around was slick, rain soaked streets of the city sloping down as people tried to walk, cycle, drive. It should’ve been snow, I murmured to M. We walked on.
In India, my parents live in Maharashtra in the West, and in-laws in the North-East, and through them we receive get a steady, varied stream of updates about the ways in which the heat has become more unbearable than the year before, or rains become more heavy and relentless, or winters more pinching and biting. As I march on outdoors on this rainy, dipping, mid-December morning to meet a friend, the fog begins to clear. I get excited at the prospect of the rain converting to snow, maybe the puzzle is, after all, solvable. That’s when the skies warm up with a fresh cover of grey, and the rain starts to fall again. We’re into the woods, winters are mildly here, but the darkness persists.
Beautiful and mournful and relatable -- we've only gotten one big snow here in Denver so far and the grass outside my window is also green. Thanks for putting such eloquent words to these feelings.
"It’s december, and yet so green, too green..." yes