Cold To The Bone
After leaving the tropics in 1961, weeks moved to Madison Wisconsin, where in the early weeks of winter that year, the temperature got down to a frigid 40 degrees below zero. That was a rude awakening for a kid that was used to going on summer holiday in December and struggled to bother to wear shoes. Wisconsin is in that frozen upper Midwest region where cold is a way of life. When you watch movies like Fargo, you wonder how people deal with the stark coldness of that region for such a long period of the year. It’s not even as though your in a quaint place like New England or a recreational hub like Colorado or Utah, where the mountains and related winter sports make up for the cold with brisk and invigorating activities like skiing and skating. What living in Wisconsin did for me was to give me an appreciation for one’s ability to survive the cold through a long winter. When we moved to Maine in 1965 it was therefore a very different experience. We arrived in January during a blizzard and suddenly had to deal with an entirely new dimension of winter. Where it had been cold in Wisconsin, Maine was perhaps cold, but also very snowy by comparison. That initial blizzard hurried our car in the hotel parking lot under a 12-foot high snow bank. The cars on the road all had styrofoam day-glo balls on their antennas so that you could get advance warning at intersections that someone was coming from another direction. It was amazing how much that much snow puts the cold into a back seat in your consciousness.
My time in Maine made me a devotee of skiing and that made winter a nice time of year that was looked forward to. When I moved to Italy in 1968, I may have lived in a warm place like Rome, but during winter we went up to Apennines to ski regularly and ventured further north into the Dolomites and Alps several times a year for ski holidays. I think my love of skiing just made me forget about the cold per se since I was always hoping for snow. During college in Upstate New York, we had plenty of cold and snow, but there is so much going on in a young person’s life at that stage that temperature plays a de minimus role. Even snow and skiing take a back seat to coursework, exams and socializing. You just put on your parka and trudge up to class or out to the fraternity for dinner, getting by as you need to.
The start of the working life in a place like New York City is very much the same with other priorities and weather in general taking a back seat to the exigencies of the moment. I can honestly say that my choice of where to work and live in my early career gave zero weight to the issue of weather. That is not to say I was oblivious to it, but just that it was another minor factor to consider when suiting up for the day. I remember my first winter season in New York when I got to Thanksgiving and considered that I might just be able to get by with just my raincoat and a scarf, being the robust and tough guy that I was. The first big snowstorm of the season disabused me of that thinking once and for all. Winter weather became a bigger issue than I thought and cost me more to combat than I had hoped, but it was still just a fact of life that had to be accommodated. I can distinctly recall thinking that people who dreamed of moving somewhere warmer were flighty and didn’t have their priorities straight. What mattered was career and making money. All else, especially seasonal comfort, paled by comparison in importance.
We all mellow with age and I too started caring a bit more about my leisure time, but it so happens that one of the activities I wanted most to pursue was skiing. Had it been beachcombing or boating, perhaps the temperature would have been more on my mind. But as a skier, I had put cold weather into a positive category and I bought a vacation house first in the hills of the Berkshires and then in the mountains of Utah. Even though I had a beach house during those years as well, that was for the convenience of spending time conveniently with my children, who lived on Long Island. My heart went to the mountains and snow because skiing was my sport of choice and being in the cold was simply part of the requirement was to be in the cold. You take on an attitude that its all invigorating and healthful and you never really complain about it unless it gets into the real extremes.
I had one Utah ski house or another for fifteen years, but when I met Kim, she did not ski and I had more or less had my fill of skiing. So I sold my place on the mountain and hung loose for a while, contemplating where I would buy for the future of my retirement. I found myself between the proverbial rock and a hard place. I wanted marker weather since skiing would be out of the picture, but my early days in the tropics did not endear me to places like Florida. The tropics gave me the creepy crawly feeling that I never liked and my work travels to Latin America did nothing to improve that feeling that I needed to stay away from the moist and damp parts of the world. That is what ultimately pushed me to the West because I liked the big sky of places like Utah but wanted to avoid the arid and hot areas like the flats of Arizona. San Diego came on our screen as the perfect balance of sub-tropical and yet arid weather. The North County area where our hillside sits is especially at that inflection point with its high chaparral landscape and its succulent garden landscape.
I didn’t really move to San Diego for the weather, but its like that old adage they say in Utah that you come for the the winters and stay for the summers. The more time I spend in San Diego, the more I appreciate the importance of weather in my daily pleasure. While we like our rainy days more than ever, what we really like is the fact that almost every morning starts with sunshine and warmth and then its just a matter of whether the weather will turn warm or cool. It doesn’t really go too much to the extremes of hot or cold, which is nice.
But then we come back to New York City for a visit like we do every December. We are immediately reminded that the cold is a demanding bitch. As air travelers we are always seeking efficiency in packing, so we check the online weather ahead of coming and try our best to figure out what will suffice for a short visit. I know I don’t want to be cold while I’m here, but I also don’t want to bring my entire storm closet for what might happen. This trip seemed easy because the temperature hasn’t dropped too far yet in the season. But last night when we went over to Grand Central to meet friends for dinner at Cipriani, it was a decidedly brisk walk home as the mercury was falling into the thirties. I have one more sortie planned this evening over to the West Side for Kim’s gala. I will Uber over, so my polar tech vest will suffice, but it will remind me of why I am glad not to live in New York City any longer. Getting cold to the bone is a familiar feeling to me, but not one that I want to experience regularly. I’m happy to be heading back to our warm hillside tomorrow.