MOA - December 31, 2011

It was a lovely dusk at the dog park, and the same this morning when we went for our walk. About the same as yesterday, with a high a little above 40°F. Nondescript weather. Then about 8:30 tonight it began to snow, as we were coming back from a New Years Eve party. By the time we got home, it was sticking. A quick, dense burst of snowfall, and finally it's properly winter again. We'll have cold again tomorrow and wind. I'll need the parka, and the boiled-wool jacket will be back in the closet again.

This afternoon, I took Daniel to Mall of America, the largest enclosed shopping center in the United States (and getting bigger: a hotel is being added to its south front). Traffic was not as bad as one might expect on a holiday Saturday. Perhaps people were still a little spooked by the melée that broke out at the mall last Monday, the day Christmas was observed.

Minnesota used to take no small pride in its indoor spaces. They were the first site of an enclosed mall, at Southdale Center in 1956. We have the Minneapolis and St Paul downtown habitrail skyway system. We've had an indoor dome for football and baseball.

But something has happened over the last decade or so. I think the first realization, which happened pretty early, was that the Metrodome was a lousy place to watch a baseball game, especially on those perfect summer evenings we treasure here. Then street life began to outstrip the skyways as the salient feature of downtown Minneapolis, and to some extent St Paul.

The Mall of America continues to dominate, though, and many of the other regional malls continue to do just fine, thank you. The original four "Dales" (Southdale, Ridgedale, Rosedale and Brookdale) were later joined by Eden Prairie Center, Burnsville Center, and Maplewood Center. But after that, a funny thing happened. The new retail centers of the last 20 years were open-air experiments of various kinds: "lifestyle centers", "new main streets" and similar new-urbanism-ish shopping areas.

This year, Brookdale, which had been fading for some time, is finally being torn down. It joined the metro area's second enclosed mall (and the one nearest to us), Apache Plaza, which was torn down in 2004.

The fact is, after the novelty fades, all these indoor spaces eventually elicit strongly mixed emotions, based largely on their artificiality, the way they are cut off from the "real world." Sometimes this is good, sometimes it is stifling. Will this ever happen to the Mall of America? It's consistently kept ahead of the jaded consumer factor: it adds just enough and promotes just enough to not be too passe for most visitors—and the MOA gets 40 million visits a year, almost eight times the population of Minnesota.

As it gets seriously cold (and it will, eventually, get down below zero here), I think not so much of the mall as of conservatories. St Paul has an absolutely wonderful one, the Marjorie Neely Conservatory in Como Park. It feels so wonderfully green and alive, in all of one's senses, especially in February, when the outdoors seem not only dead but deadly.

And I'm fondly remembering the gardens that used to sit on the top floor of Town Square, an enclosed shopping mall in downtown St Paul. It's a non-descript space now, no longer used as a park, but in the 1980's and 1990's, I at least thought it was magical.

I think the difference in reaction between the two is simple: one give us what we think we want, and one gives what we really need, to relieve us from the stresses of the weather.

Eh... December 30, 2011

So I walked the dog this morning, and Daniel and I took her to the dog park this afternoon. That's really all there is to report. The thing is, it isn't especially cold. I also walked to work this morning, and it was no big deal. It was nice, really. Right around freezing, and hardly any wind.

There's a certain piece of us that thinks "weather" means drama. Days like today, I don't really notice the weather especially. It's been like that the last few days, come to think of it. Coming into this project, I assumed it was lack of attention on my part that made me "miss" the weather, but the fact is, as my wife once said to me about the challenges of writing about restaurants: There's only so many ways you can say "Eh...it was fine."

So when I conjure up the chechaquos freezing to death in the Yukon, or the Ice Man frozen into an Alpine glacier, I'm really upping the ante to what is in many ways a humdrum, everyday habit. And to some extent always has been. Some weather you endure, some you celebrate, and some you just try and ignore and get on with what you need to do.

Chechaquo - December 29, 2011

But all this—the mysterious, far-reaching hair-line trail, the absence of sun from the sky, the tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness of it all—made no impression on the man. It was not because he was long used to it. He was a newcomer in the land, a chechaquo, and this was his first winter. The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the universe. Fifty degrees below zero stood for a bite of frost that hurt and that must be guarded against by the use of mittens, ear-flaps, warm moccasins, and thick socks. Fifty degrees below zero was to him just precisely fifty degrees below zero. That there should be anything more to it than that was a thought that never entered his head. —Jack London, "To Light a Fire," 1908.

I have friends who really love spending time actively out in the cold and snow. A couple of them go snow-camping up north every year, snowshoeing into a remote camp and setting up. Another friend slept for some time in the unheated attic of her house: she routinely woke up in winter with frost on her bedclothes.

There's something about the inevitablility and aloofness with which the unnamed character in Jack London's story dies, that reminds me of the casual horror of Barry Lopez's "Light Action in the Caribbean." It reminds me that things dying, and creatures killing one another, are everyday occurrences, and that we are all of us creatures.

We went skating at the very tame frozen pond at Centennial Lakes in Edina tonight. I am a lousy skater, and my skates hurt, but aside from that it was a good time. That kind of super-domesticated outdoors—lighted, piped-in music, a crowd of teenagers goofing around, families with children—is utterly different from the man freezing to death in the Yukon. And yet, with all the thin ice we have this year, lots of people have fallen in lakes this winter, doing pretty comparable domesticated things: driving back to shore on a 4-wheeler to get more beer, or skating...

I did walk Anya today too, twice, but it didn't really feel like a walk. Once was dropping off Daniel at a friend's house, and taking Anya around to do what needed doing; the other was also perfunctory, walking with all of us for a couple of blocks after we came home. It's been a steady diet of normal winter weather, with highs in the low 30°s. Sunny, pleasant, gently wintry. Nothing like the bone-chilling weather the chechaquo foolishly went out alone into.

I know I'm a chechaquo, a softy. Even my wife, who runs all winter long, is a tougher soul than me. I'm happy to skate around a suburban rink, with a nice warming room inside. I'm a fan of not going beyond the smell of hot chocolate. Of walking the dog. I'm not a wilderness trekker. So if I identify at all with the dying prospector, it's in knowing that sense of "Wow, I could have just died then," and doing what I can not to get myself into situations where I think that. A part of my protection from the elements is a cautious sensibility that avoids dangerous weather. Maybe it's a bit of a drama queen, but it's kept me alive so far...

History and individual initiative - December 28, 2011

I didn't walk Anya at all today—Ingrid walked her this morning after I left for work, and then took her to the dog park this afternoon, after which she passed out. My time outside today was going to and from work, like it was in the time before Anya. I drove to work, drove home, and then got a ride back in the late afternoon with my son, and then we both took the bus back and walked the four blocks from the co-op.

In any of the processes we use to shield us from the outdoors, we like to think about our individual decisions, but so much of what we do is dependent upon—and linked together with—a huge mass of people. Taking the bus, this is obvious: the system exists because of all these other people filling up the #10 at 6 pm. Driving myself around in the car it's not so obvious, which allows an odd kind of distortion in political thinking about transportation. Elizabeth Warren did an excellent job of puncturing that kind of thinking in her much-quoted campaign speech:


So does this really deny the Jack London mystique: individuals using their initiative to save themselves and maybe their loved ones if they have any, from the brutal elements? Is this an either-or thing? I don't think Warren is saying that about our economy. And in looking at humans and the elements, it's also a two-handed approach: we take a great deal of knowledge, and a lot of collected-together work by individuals, and we use it as individuals... and as co-operative units. I don't end up walking the dog every day. Most days I do, but sometimes that just isn't the best use of my time in the family.

When we talk about the history, as I've hesitatingly done in this first week of blogging, it's so tempting to try and say "this is how people did things back then." But of course each person had their own specific way of doing things. So I can generalize, and I'm sure I'll continue to do that, but where there is no mandated social norm, and no collective mass commercial or cultural imprint, there will be variations: people in 1870's Minnesota negotiated their own individual and household-wide little dance of firewood, coal, warm clothing and bedding, and body warmth.

When it comes to personal history, what we can do is go back to individual histories. By collecting enough of these, we can get a glimpse at the latitude people had to do that dance. We can see where external pressures dictated the limits of their response. Maybe that's a more productive way of looking at this.

Take, for example, Laura Ingalls Wilder's childhood.

Hats - December 27, 2011

Yep, it turned colder overnight. They'd predicted 20°F, but it was 30 when I got up and walked Anya. But it was bright sun, and the breeze took severl blocks to make me really regret not wearing a hat. Even when we went out to the dog park after dark at 5:30 for a little "geocaching party," it was perfectly pleasant with a hat on.

Hats. It isn't true that you lose half your body heat through your head, but on a cold day it can feel like it. All the extremities tend to lose heat faster than the body's core: just more surface area per volume. Your ears, nose, and chin, being up on top of your body, are also most exposed to wind.

And especially if you're a male, you're likely to begin losing what natural skull-covering you were born with, by the time you're in your mid-20s.

The fur-lined hat, like the fur-lined anuraaq (that's anorak to you) seems like such a natural outgrowth of the instinct to put something—anything—insulating up against the ears, it's probably the foundational hat. After that? foundational proto-knitting like nålebinding or crochet, probably.

I'm in the early stages of Women's Work, and what I find most interesting is how much earlier spinning weaving came to general usage than knitting. Wool twills were being made 3000 years ago, and no-one has mentioned knitting yet at all; the date I recall is somewhere a little before 0 BC, but certainly not into the early Iron age of Hallstatt fabrics. The reason this seems backwards is that the set-up for weaving is so much more involved: stringing the warp into heddles alone is a pretty technically sophisticated job. By contrast, knitting requires a single ball of yarn and two sticks. It's as portable as spinning, a similarly carry-everywhere process.

Besides, who wants to wear a woven hat or mittens?

Now, the piece I want to know about is protecting the face. More later...

layering, December 26, 2011

I have three weights of coat that I wear outside, when I wear a coat at all. Really, I have five iterations of above-the-waist-wear: short-sleeved shirt, long-sleeved shirt, long-sleeved shirt with a sweater or windbreaker, long-sleeved shirt with my boiled-wool mid-weight jacket, and long-sleeved shirt with parka. That's it.

It was 50°F this afternoon as I took Anya and Daniel to the dog park. Boiled-wool-jacket weather, probably the last for a couple months. Absolutely glorious. Very odd for Minneapolis the day after Christmas—I think we broke the record for the day, set in 1936—but absolutely lovely. We drop down to 20°F tonight as a front rolls through, and we're back to normal tomorrow, not getting above freezing.

I'm sure serious outdoor folks shake their heads when they see my overly-simple top-half recipe above. And they're right: I don't dress for sustained exercise outdoors. I know that if I did, I should learn to layer. That's the gospel from the world of mountaineering and high-altitude hiking. My parents layer every day, around the house.

Did Native Americans layer, pre-European contact? I mean tribal groups like the Ojibwe and Dakota who lived up here in the snowy climes. There's good documentation on Inuit clothing (layering in spades), for example here, but not much on groups further south.

And the European layerings we've largely inherited... where did these come from? It strikes me that what we wear now is variously cobbled together from a bunch of Northern cultures: Scandianvian sweaters with North American mukluks, Russian hats and Scottish woolen scarves... all accompanied by fibers that were invented only a generation or two ago.

Maybe we need to look form by form for a sense of where things came from. Ingrid has recommended Womens Work by Elizabeth Wayland Barber as a great source on this history of fiber and clothing. I'll start in on it tonight. One piece I'm especially interested in: the comparative newness of knitting.

Attention span - December 25, 2011

It's been really lovely today: up around 40, sunny all day. I took Anya out for a walk down the street this morning, and over to the dog park this afternoon. Not a white Christmas, but nice and quiet. Sadly, Ingrid was sick with a cold all day. But it was a lovely quiet day for all the mammals in the house.

Walking with her this morning, it occurred to me that what I said yeaterday about the difference in attention between heating with gas, electricity, or oil, and heating with coal, wood, or pellets, is the same as the difference between caring for a cat and caring for a dog. You still need to pay attention, and it surely doesn't hurt to pay more attention, but the immediate consequences of truly ignoring your dog for six or seven hours are a lot messier than doing the same for a cat.

We're house-sitting a friend's cat over the Christmas week, and we go over once a day to change the food and water and clean the litter. When we just had cats, we hired a sitter, and we asked they spend a little attention time, at least to the ones that liked attention. The one we're sitting now has made it clear we are not his people—he tolerates a little head scritch, but then he has other things to do, thank you very much.

Really, this distinction of frequency of attention applies to almost any management or care situation. More attention is required of by kindergarteners than fifth-graders, and if there's a fifth-grader who requires kindergarten-style attention, that can be a problem.

I think one can say of any of the systems we've put in place to deal with conditions outdoors, and to keep those outdoors out, that they are designed to lengthen the time between attention. They are designed, in effect, to let us do other things than deal with rain and snow and wind, heat and cold.

Is this what technology is in general, a way to let us stop paying so much attention to this, so we have more time to pay attention to that? What then of people who intentionally ignore a technology, because they want to pay more attention to this?

Home heating - December 24, 2011

It was a warm late afternoon when we went to the dog park—low 40s°F. It felt like early spring, or late fall... still parka weather if you weren't moving around much. It's Christmas Eve, of course, and everyone I know has an opinion about the not-so-white Christmas... you hear grumbling about global warming, and about skiing. Personally, I'm enjoying the warmish spell. I grew up in New Jersey, and this feels like home.

My parents still live in the house I grew up in, and recently added new storm windows and doors, making the house considerably less drafty. This week they're replacing the furnace. I think of it as the "new" furnace, as it was put in after I'd mostly left home, but it's still 24 years old.

They're switching to natural gas from fuel oil, which had to be delivered by truck periodically and stored in a 500 gallon tank in the corner of the basement. I don't know anyone who heats with fuel oil here in Minneapolis, but all three of the houses I've lived in in the Northeast had the big tanks.

How we heat our homes varies regionally in the United States. Natural gas has the majority of the market, but electricity is much more dominant in regions that don't require many heating days: while the cost per BTU is significantly higher, the equipment costs are much lower. Fuel oil has a dominant place in the Northeast. I'm curious why this is; the answer is suggested by this thread: when the switch from coal happened after World War II, it was relatively cheap to run gas lines in the Midwest, with its glacial till soil, vs. New England's rocky outcrops. Still in all but urban areas, most people who use gas have propane tanks outside. Fuel oil was cheaper than gas until fairly recently. I'm sure there's a bigger story there somewhere...

This PDF from the census gives some sense of regional variation 1970-1990. I have the data for a proportional state-by-state map with 2005-2009 data, and some other data for 1940-2000. What I'd really like to see is state-by-state and region-by-region (and maybe city vs rural) the trend from 1900-2000. Coal was clearly king for some period up to the end of World War II. Was this true in rural areas too? I assume having any kind of heat was a luxury for a lot of the South and Southwest.

What is the overall track for heating with wood, that seductive but highly polluting option? In Vermont, where I lived for seven years, a lot of people heated with wood, or heavily supplemented with wood, or with coal or pellets. All of these are non-automatic: no furnace that turns on a pump when the thermostat gets low. The difference is hard to understand if you haven't lived with it; it means a different kind of attention to your environment, day and night.

Ready to hit the slopes - December 23, 2011

I walked Anya this morning and again at night. In the morning it was flurrying snow, with a cold wind. It was probably colder at night, but it was still and clear, quite lovely. It was cold walking to the bus after walking the dog, and it was cold when I had to do fieldwork outside in downtown Minneapolis on Wednesday afternoon, also in the snow. It may be a mild winter, but it is still winter.

People have been living through Minnesota winters since long before nylon, before goose-down, before wool even. But the constant thread running through winter clothing is simple: we adopt other animal's protection. Whether we kill the animal an use its skin and fur, or harvest hair and feathers, the fact remains that much of our best protection from the cold is nothing more technologically advanced than borrowing other animal's warmth.

My mother remembers that after World War II, it was a great relief to have nylon return to the market. We remember nylon stockings in this regard as a precious commodity during the war, but it was also a useful part of winter coats. Petrochemical-based fibers like polyester and Gore-tex are still used widely, but as linings and for waterproof shells. When I was growing up, polyfill was the insulation in cheap jackets—the good ones were goosedown, or heavy wool. Of fur. Animal fiber.

The funny thing about looking for the history of "winter clothing" is that the source of much of our current styling is a relatively recent fad: cold-weather athletics. Mountain climbing was a new sport in the mid-nineteenth century. Alpine skiing wasn't even in the first two winter Olympics—when you see movies of people on the slopes in Babar or movies from the 1940's, it's sort of a new and stylish thing to do.

And it's that injection of the idea that being outside in the snow and cold is fun that's really changed the way we think about winter clothing. Most of us don't dress for survival, though when it gets very cold that still can be a real concern. Our clothes are about comfort and style.

Alpine dogs and Arctic people - Dec 22, 2011

It was 24°F when I took Anya around the park near my son's school. She did her business, and I briefly let her off-leash to romp with two spaniels who were visiting from up North. She just wanted to roll around in the snow-dusted grass and sniff things.

St Bernards were bred as mountain rescue dogs, though their value as such was diminished when they were cross-bred with Newfoundlands in the 1820's, to save a breed decimated by avalanches in 1816-1818. Their fur became long like Newfoundlands', making it likely to be weighed down by snow.

Nevertheless, they are not hot-weather dogs. Anya drooped all summer, camping out in front of the air conditioner. Now? She romps in the snow, sniffing (looking for people buried under the avalanches?). She will happily bat around chips of ice for hours. She thinks she's back in the Alps.

It's stories like this that have made it tempting to say that people genetically adapt to their environment: that Inuit are somehow genetically set up for life in the Arctic, or Indonesians for life by the Equator. Evidence says otherwise: Inuit resilience to cold is largely due to diet—probably a blubber allergy would be trouble for an Inuit living in the traditional Inuit way, but if you feed them typical "western" food, their cold resistance is about the same as any of us. And people who live in the tropics largely just adopt clothing, daily habits, and diet that make their lives more comfortable.

So, it's our flexible brain, not our other physical genetic adaptability, that has made humans able to live in such a huge variety of climates. In this, we are unusual among animals, at least if you think of the brain as somehow different from other parts of the body. We do adapt, but we adapt in large part by taking bits of the world around us, and shaping those in turn to make clothing, shelter, and other tools to shield ourselves from a changing environment.

Introduction - December 21. 2011

It's the longest night of the year, or at any rate the night when the sun is furthest away from us in Minnesota. It seems an appropriate time to start writing something for a year.

I walked Anya this morning, and again at noon. I do this a lot, and so does my wife. Anya came to us through the Midwest Animal Rescue League last September, more than a year ago now, and we love her a lot. She's a St Bernard, small for her breed, who arrived in the rescue system not much more than skin and bones, with opportunistic infections and not much fur. She's much better now.

We don't have a fenced yard, so rain or shine, snow or hurricane, we're outside with her as she does what she needs to do. And I can honestly say I can't remember being so intensely aware of the weather as I have been this last year.

I don't think I'm that different from most Americans in this. When the weather is nice, we like to be outside. I keep a bit of garden, and we like to go for a walk when we get the chance. My son, who is nine, has discovered a passion for geocaching.

However, when it gets unbearably hot, or wet, or cold, or windy, we go from house to car to store to office, as quickly as possible. Here in Minneapolis, this is especially evident: We go from an average January low temperature of about 5°F to an average July high of around 85°F, which is about as big a gap as you can find south of Canada. We're not the snowiest place in the lower 48 states (upstate New York and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan have us beat), nor the coldest or windiest (the Dakotas and northern Minnesota do that up right), but we get plenty of cold, and in the summer we get some serious scorchers.

Now, this could end up being a project about climate change... we're having a warm winter this year, with no appreciable snow on the ground just a few days before Christmas, and the new, warmer climate is on a lot of peoples' minds. But that isn't what this is about. I want to look at how we have found ways to avoid weather—to protect ourselves from it, get out of its way, and build our world such that it can slide past us, sometimes annoying, but seldom the awesome calamity we like to make it out to be. How have we done this? If this project has anything to say about climate change, its about the camouflage patterning we've erected around us to shield ourselves from the idea that weather matters.