The Terror Time - January 7, 2012

I actually didn't walk Anya at all today; Ingrid took her to doggie day care, which she loves, at 9 this morning, and we picked her up at 7 this evening, and in the meantime we went out and did a bunch of fun things, pretty much all indoors. Well, all except Daniel's dance rehearsal, getting ready for a performance at Matthews Park in the Seward neighborhood in a couple weeks, outdoors in the middle of winter.

People have been making art in the winter outdoors for a long time; when snow is a novelty, we make snowmen and forts and snow sculpture. In the show of Japanese woodblock prints I saw this afternoon, there are pictures of tourists coming out to enjoy the snowy views in scenic spots near Edo or Kyoto, 200 years ago.

These days, Minnesota has Art Shanties (icehouses out on lakes with art), art-sled races, ice luminaries. We've had ice palaces, and there's ice sculpture... all to encourage us not to do what is so tempting when it actually does turn bone-chilling: stay huddled indoors.

And this really points to a change we've gone through over the last few centuries: By and large, people aren't really afraid of winter in the cities. Our fear is either immediate (of crashing into that snowplow with the patch of glare ice), or rooted in an old sense of danger, akin to the fear of wolves in the forest that was entirely legitimate 1000 years ago, but hasn't been an issue for centuries now... and yet, there it is embedded in our fairy tales, and unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

I'm struck by the shift in weather reports quoted in Snow in the Cities, which I'm reading now. Colonial-era narratives spend a lot of time equating bad weather with God's wrath, calling on repentence in the face of blizzards (though it turns out "blizzard" was a new word as of about 1880... who knew?). By the nineteenth century, though, weather was a natural menace, and a scientific approach was more widely accepted.

I want to know more about this balance between fear and enjoyment of inclement weather. I suspect it has as much to do with economics as anything. Ewan Macoll's song, "The Terror Time," about the part of late winter when food begins to run out, isn't about ancient times; it's about the traveling people of mid-20th century Scotland. Poor folk. And it will be true of anyone homeless today and without recourse: the cold brings misery and fear.