Snow coat / no coat

To anyone who's flat-broke and living on rice noodles and frozen peas, a few bucks feels like a windfall. A 20-dollar bill means groceries for a week (chips, salsa, accoutrements) and $50 is a very merry un-birthday with every bit as much cake, singing, adrenaline, and boxed wine. The relative nature of whatever happens to be my current status in life-- the role of perception-- is never more clear than when I'm suddenly bereft of things I once took for granted. These things are not always financial; right now, for instance, I'm plenty well-fed and have a safe-and-sound roof over my head, but countless times since my arrival in Anchorage I've been slapped in the face with the reality of life without access to a great number of things. The availability of authentic Mexican street food comes to mind, as does the availability of Indian cuisine, boba tea, hookah lounges, nightlife, daylight, rent-by-the-hour karaoke rooms, movie theaters, tapas bars, evidence that any building or dwelling or cultural feature existed prior to 1955*, and wildlife that doesn't thirst to harm me.

I bring this up because, of all the ways Alaska has shifted my perception and my expectations, none have been more drastic and brutal than the forcible readjustments I've received regarding climate.

I now know the True Meaning of Winter. I know it deep in the marrow of my bones since coming to Alaska.

And yet...

Last night, I walked outside for 5 minutes and did not need to zip up my winter coat. Droplets fell on my head. DROPLETS. Not flakes. Not ice pellets.

Today, I woke up, checked the weather, and saw a miraculous sight:

No filter.

Is this real life? I wondered, dazed by irrefutable evidence that I have a fighting chance at surviving the winter after all.

"Is this real life?" I texted Matt, along with the screen capture pictured above. There was only one way to find out. I ate breakfast, watched Friends (priorities, after all), and bundled up to face the brave new world. I cautiously, mindfully bundled less than I usually do and took my first tentative steps outside.

I was assaulted by spring.

The sky was bright blue-- but not cold blue, as it so often is, blue because there is no insulating cloud cover to keep the frigid breath of outer space from wafting down on the barren land. The sky was warm blue, brilliant with sunlight, radiating on the wet earth, on the melting snow, on the slickening, watery ice that now covered the streets and sidewalks. More maddening than the warm sunlight, though, was the smell. The air smelled vernal. It smelled of thaw and freshness and dirt and leaves. It made me feel wild to my core.

I used to think Los Angeles had a dry climate, coming, as I did, from Portland. It was positively tropical compared to Alaska. Here, every inhalation draws sharp, cold, scentless, bone-dry air into my nostrils and lungs; I've taken to dabbing coconut oil in my nostrils to combat nosebleeds, and I have an eternal rasp in the base of my throat. These nuisances have only exacerbated my seasonal depression, a condition I rarely experienced after moving to California but which I correctly assumed would worsen in the lightless winters of Alaska. I take it for what it is and I cling to my vitamin D and sunlamp.

When I stepped outside into the warm blue day and breathed deeply of the damp, earth-scented air today, I felt myself powering up like a solar cell. Over the course of my walk, my mood elevated more than it has in the whole time I've lived in Alaska; I felt stress and sadness fall away in layers as I picked my way gingerly over the impossibly slippery ground.

And I quickly found, to my surprise and delight, that the relatively light bundling I'd done was too much. The winter garb came off by layers in brisk intervals. Before long, I was hatless, gloveless, and coatless; my winter jacket was tied around my waist, leaving me plenty warm in just my long-sleeved fleecy shirt. Round-trip, the walk was almost 6 miles long, and my hands stayed warm throughout. I had my headphones on and listened to the whimsical rock 'n' roll of Jack White's Lazaretto, thinking fondly about the 6-mile walks I would take last year to this album, from Hollywood to Burbank, over the hill, under the oak trees, along Cahuenga and Barham, working up a sweat in my tank top with my hoodie tied around my waist. My life could not be more different now from what it was then. But I still love the adventure of going for a long walk with music in my headphones and seeing what my own two feet can accomplish.

Everywhere, I saw evidence that thaw was imminent and winter might in fact end. This bench was very nearly visible!

So was this car!

Enough snow had melted around the base of a blue spruce tree to reveal ACTUAL, LITERAL, REAL LIFE GREEN GRASS.

Not pictured: My ecstatic incredulity

I happened upon a tree whose branches were laden with fuzzy buds that looked like enlarged pussy willows. I squinted at them to block out the snow and pretended it was April in the woods of Oregon. I nuzzled my cheek against them and felt how velvety soft they were. I took a picture of a branch against blue sky and imagined spring.

As I walked down a sun-drenched street flooded with rivulets of snowmelt and shielded my eyes from the light reflecting off the glassy shine of the road, I reflected how 45º in Los Angeles feels like the bitter end of the world. In a balmy land of near-constant summer, temperatures in the 40s seem aggressively foreign and unknowable, like a dark abyss nobody has the courage to peer into. On the deepest winter nights when it's occasionally dropped to the low 40s in Los Angeles, I've shuddered and wailed in terror and dismay and cried, "I did not move to California for this!" In the land where now I dwell, with snowfall in May and routinely subzero winters, 45º has me shedding my coat and singing for joy.

The cold will clench its fist again before this long winter is over. The ground will freeze, the melting water will turn to treacherous ice, the blue sky will lose its warmth and once again become the death rattle of the universe breathing down on the wizened mountains. But now I know what is to come. I've smelled the earthy air and I've seen the matted grass and I've felt the fuzzy pussy willows against my cheek. I've walked outside in February without a coat, and I've lived to tell the mighty tale.

Come back if you must, winter. But I'm warning you-- I'm hip to your tricks now. And I'm losing my patience.

*(Alaska Native people and culture, have, of course, existed in the area from time immemorial, though historical Alaska Native villages and structures are not evident in Anchorage. On the basis of superficial aesthetics alone, Anchorage appears to have been conceived and constructed sometime between 1950 and 1980 by utilitarian-minded homebodies.)