I’ll also offer that, now living in southern NM, a similar experience can be had by being out in the heat of the day. But only for those who choose it…

But it might be necessary to remind you of that walking tour in Rome. You know, the one with all the rain? And only one of us got to change his clothes before class started? I felt pretty cold then and, I dare say, morally superior to the one who was dry, though only for a moment. He did, after all, walk to get his clothes.

Good article though, its nice to read about things like this so I don’t have to experience them myself.

A snippet from my most recent blog posting, on a related theme:

“So long as well-meaning people remain behind those damned windshields (waiting for third-party “solutions”), they will not learn the first thing about what we-the-people collectively must do to create…not “walkable communities”…but “communities that walk”; communities that bike; and communities that have enough of us walking and biking to make transit viable.”

http://entropicjournal.blogspot.com/2010/02/communities-that-walk.html

The problem with this here aborning Banana Republic is that it aint warm enough over half of it to raise a damned Crepe Myrtle, let alone a tasty banana. Case in point to JS Bangs refutation…them poets he cited come from salubrious Banana Republics. The best we will be able to hope for is a dark homily on excessive household vermin, skittering and nibbling away on the welted skin of lengthy shut-ins.

But, here in southern New England, it is cold but we don’t even get much snow dammit. Shoveling 2″ of snow off a 200′ driveway is an act of self-damnating amateurism. However, around two weeks from now , the Red Maple Buds will start to bulge and the willows and Red Osier dogwood will color the bottoms with their faintly awakening branches and then…well then, March will come knocking with some sunny 50 degree days and the mauve on the hillsides will deepen and in another month and a half, the biggest damned show of exploding biomass and life on this sordid planet will bust out like a Symphony …just before the chewing black flies take a big bite out of the revery. Even cold-weather Banana Republics can have Cheroots, Connecticut wrapped, the thinking man’s insect spray.

I like winter…the rocks show on the tough terrain and I am only thankful that business shall take me to Fort Lauderdale right about the time I am ready to give up.

After all, cold to hot it is ipsum esse….IPSUM ESSE my friends…the great simple beauty of it all. Nature does complexity with simple beauty…too bad we real smart humans caint seem to get the hang of it.

I know this is hyperbole, but… really? Do you really expect me to believe that, even if jest? Because I immediately think of Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Umberto Eco, and Chinua Achebe, to say nothing of Dante, Homer, and the Psalmist!

Aside from that, I loved the article.

Before I was self-employed I, too, numbered among the ranks of the elite walk-to-work corps. And in a prior job I bicycled a few miles. We are different than regular people.

The Minnesota winter of 2009/10 is shaping up to be the coldest and snowiest since my childhood in the 70′s, and with every fresh snowfall I rejoice. In my time in California I found the air stale and the weather boring, but you won’t hear me rhapsodize over the character building hardship of Minnesota’s mosquitoes: Exhibit A in the fallen world hypothesis.

Speaking of walking, I’m just to the end of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain. It has a lot of walking. It’s surprisingly good.

Cold…I remember the cold at 4:30 AM on my way through the environs of Irishtown to serve 5 AM mass for the pottery workers, when the only sound was the crunch of my buckled boots against the snow and me talking to God and Him to me.

Cold…I remember my old man’s stories of the Bulge, the winter of 44/45 when the temperature dropped to fifty below and my old man’s defusing land mines and buried ordinance and finding chickens for his platoon to eat.

Cold…when I broke through the ice on a flooded creek feeding into the frozen Ohio River and my pal, Smitty, who followed my body under the ice being pulled by the current, and had the insight to pick up a tree branch and when I finally broke through to lay it by and holler, “Hold on, Cheeks!” And I did, out of fear, , I held on with one frozen hand and Smitty saved me.

Cold…in the midst of our woods, with the trees glazed in hoarfrost and the spring frozen hard until March. The silence is pure and so is life and I talk to God and He to me.