January’s Icy Blues

It’s cold out there on the Camino a Ítaca this week. The cover of a New Yorker issue sparked a refection on what has brought me so far from my origins. Click over to read the original version published in Spanish in el HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

It’s never a good sign
when you wake up in the morning and from the warm, comfortable confines of your
blanketed bed you can see your breath spread out above you. Each exhalation
acts as a stark reminder of just how cold it is outside the welcome embrace of
your nordic duvet. That fluffy shield that acts as a barrier between you and
the freezing, cruel winter world that awaits just beyond your warm feet.  

Thirty years ago I set out
from a frozen, snowy place somewhere near the top of the world. I happened to
be born in the last city of any real size, in what some people have called the
New World. A place where the fabled Alaskan highway starts and the true great
north opens up and skids across the tundra and ice all the way to the North
Pole.

It was only after years of
travel that I came to the very Canadian realization that, in most places in the
world, six or seven months of the year did not have to be lived with the
painful reality of thirty below temperatures and the near-constant threat of frozen
ears. Since that day, I became what I call a climactic refugee and have sought
out places to live that don’t suffer from such extreme conditions. Yet I ended
up, somewhat ironically, in a place that carries ‘extreme’ in its name.

As a Canadian here in
Extremadura I am often asked how it is possible to survive winters in a snow
and icebound place where the temperatures can often spend weeks at thirty below
zero. The answer is relatively easy. In Canada, the only time that you are cold
is when you are outside. A place you avoid as much as possible by traveling
directly from warmed cars to heated buildings. It would be unthinkable to live
in a place where there was no heating, it would literally be a question of life
or death.

But here in Extremadura, shielded
from the northern storms below the central mountain chain, you find many homes
whose only source of heat is a brazier or plug-in radiators. Gadgets that take
the bite out of the air but happily eat up giga watts from the extortionate
electric companies and are only turned on when your hands start turning blue.

While climate change and
its effects were made only too clear this past summer, this week has seen the
return of winter and its accompanying cold. This chilly reality was reflected
in something a friend posted on Facebook recently. It was the cover of the New
Yorker magazine where January was depicted as an advent calendar filled with various
climate emergencies. Monday was grey, Tuesday wet, Wednesday foggy, Thursday freezing
and Friday, cold, wet, grey and foggy, with each week getting worse and worse.

Watching my breath extend
in from of me, I’m filled with the blind, illusory hope that climate change,
like certain seasonal birds, will only visit in the winter months. We still
have at least one more month of cold to go, but as my friend commented on her
post, at least February is three days shorter than January!