Was That All the Winter I'll Get?

     I know it's just the middle of January, but already I am thinking past tense: "We had a wonderful winter this year—two and a half feet of snow on the ground at my house, skiing for three days from my back door, another weekend of superb backcountry skiing with the Grants Pass Nordic Club in the Cascades between Medford and Klamath Falls."

The snow was deep and cold enough to stick heavy on the trees.

    It was over in two weeks. Already, it feels like the end of March. Every day clouds amass, then dissipate in a blue sky. Day after day the temperatures hover in the forties or above, and no precipitation falls. The next time I skied with the Nordic Club, the following weekend from the great ski just mentioned, the warmer weather had already set in, there had been no new snow, and skiing conditions were terrible. After good skiing up the open road,

On the road, just before heading downhill on a narrow trail

we entered the woods for the downhill return. The trail was narrow, with hidden ice clumps under the snow and treacherous icy stretches under the trees. Skiers were falling, one after another. In one place, we took off our skis to get down the incline, but stepping thigh-deep in the snow wasn't easy, either. One skier called it the worst ski ever. Another said that to call it technical was an understatement. (I did kind of like the challenge to my skills, though, and was pleased that I was one of the two who didn't fall.)

    Since then—no snow, no rain. I expect any day that trees will start blooming and birds returning. It all feels wacky.

    Many years ago, I heard an interview with an Aleut woman who talked about how the warming weather was affecting the migration patterns of the caribou herds her people depend on. "Global warming for you," she said, "means you have to go farther to find a place to ski. For us, it's our livelihood."

    If the winter of '21-'22 has passed already, we in southern Oregon are in as much trouble as the Aleuts. Snow is, yes, the skiing I enjoy so much, but it is also our livelihood. Lack of snow means a lack of water in the summer. It means drought. It means fire. 

    And yet the same weather pattern continues as far into the future as the weather seers predict: sunny, partly cloudy, sunny. No precipitation. As one day drops off the left side of the spectrum, a new tenth day appears at the right with the same sun and half-sun icons. This is winter only by the calendar.

    I used to enjoy the blue-sky days of early February. After continual rain in November and December, after our one or two heavy snowfalls, it put a lilt in the heart to see the sun. I loved those sunny, crisp-cold days, which are not what we're getting now. We're getting sunny, dry, too-warm days, and the sun doesn't feel like a reward for undergoing the hardship of cold but a bitter told-you-so.

    Am I worried? Yes. Do I despair? Yes. Do I see hope for a return to good weather patterns? Not much. I will do whatever is asked of me to avert the disasters of climate change, or, at this point, to mitigate the damage. But it seems that nothing is asked of me except to give up skiing.