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!