Ammi Midstokke: Welcoming winter with the right wardrobe

Summer and fall are making us soft. When I grew up here in the Northwest, we didn’t jump in the lake until Independence Day and by mid-August we were loading up the wood shed.

Obviously, real North Idahoans do that earlier, but we were California transplants and making all the mistakes sun-kissed flat-landers might make. Still, summer was a kind of blissful reprieve to nine months of winter that was cushioned with an abbreviated month of spring and fall on either side.

Now we have something romantically called Indian summers, which I’m pretty sure is a passé term for a number of good reasons and best replaced with reality: It’s getting hotter.

This is, of course, a crisis. We’re a bit fatigued with crises right now as a society, and the optimist in me is inclined to take a positive spin on the direness of the situation(s). For example, if I am wearing shorts and T-shirts for longer during the running season, my laundry demands are greatly reduced. I may just single-handedly reverse global warming by this fact alone.

While congratulating myself and wondering how many loads of laundry I have to skip to negate the carbon footprint of, say, a flight, I dressed light for a weekend adventure. I did notice that something was falling out of the sky, but failed to check the weather because I assume that we don’t get real snow until January and that’s only if the skiers pray enough. Many of us are generally low on prayers right now, though that might be the only thing we’ve got left.

While preparing for my outdoor meandering, I checked in with my ride-or-die, rain-or-shine buddy hoping she’d say something like, “Oh, it’s raining, should we bake cookies and watch ‘Schitt’s Creek’ all day instead?”

If you’re wondering, I’m in the market for some of those friends right now. All my current friends own Gore-Tex and apparently have the thermoregulation capacity of a small nuclear power plant.

I was soaked before we left the parking lot as it was raining in most directions and the 3 inches of wet snow on the ground was gathering into unavoidable slush puddles. I thought I was savvy, wearing my waterproof shoes, but they just filled with blended ice, essentially making margaritas out of my feet. Had there been any real tequila involved, I may have felt better about these circumstances.

We slogged our way up the sludge slope, stepping in creeks and small ice lakes and rivulets. The higher we climbed, the more wind accompanied the rain in a kind of miserable symphony of nature. I kept wondering what this strange weather anomaly was. Isn’t November the new September?

There was a time I greeted misery and suffering as a kind of necessity to, or validation of, a good adventure. That must have been before I was aware that suffering, struggle, loss, grief and the IRS are inevitable components of my human existence. If someone had explained this to me, I might have taken up a different set of hobbies. Maybe flower pressing or competitive napping.

The length of the hot shower necessary to recover use of my toes and fingers after this hike did not help any of my conservation goals. I’m not complaining about the possibility that we have a real winter this year, I’m just ill-prepared for it with my current lycra selection.

I shall unpack the wool and welcome the snow. I’ll listen to the quiet that descends upon the forest, relish in shoveling pathways and seeing how furry critters forage, their tiny tracks leaving trails from one tree to the next. I will patiently watch the winter lay its covers over our wooded hillside in what feels like a return to normalcy, a constant and reliable rhythm in an otherwise discordant world.

Maybe winter is nature’s way of sighing.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com