Emily Articulated: Winter people

By Emily Erickson
Reader Columnist

I remember the feeling of being zipped into my snowsuit, a bright yellow overstuffed sausage with barely contained cheeks spilling over a fleece neck warmer. I liked the coziness and the subtle restriction of my movements — my snowsuit, a soft cocoon padding me from the sharp edges of the world. I’d flop into the snowbank and let the cold flakes melt across my nose. 

Winters in Wisconsin were cold, but they were also full — full of snow days and frozen lakes, woodstoves and frosted tree tops. I loved the crunch of ice underfoot, my boots’ imprints feeling permanent; my impact on my surroundings pressed firmly into the frozen earth.

Back then, winter wasn’t a season of sport for me. I didn’t ski or skate or ride, but I did know a hundred ways to wield a shovel. I employed the sharp edge of plastic like a pickaxe and scooped and scraped and slapped to excavate a body-sized tube of air from a snow berm. After a day’s labor, a tunnel of ice would give way to a glistening frozen dome — a snowy kingdom

Emily Erickson. Courtesy photo.

, my palace of winter wonder.

When I moved to Sandpoint it was in the middle of a snowstorm. I crossed the Long Bridge blinded to the water and mountains just beyond by a whiteout. That winter, dubbed “Snowmageddon,” I snowshoed every day, falling in love with a place that combined endless views with milder temperatures than I’d grown up in. I learned to snowboard and cross-country ski and winter was forever cemented as a season of activity. I no longer needed to create palaces of winter wonder. Instead, I simply lived inside of one. 

But recently, the guarantee of snow in winter feels past tense. Now, it’s something found after a drive up the mountain, an escape from the monochromatic browns and grays of town. The sun stays hidden in rain-heavy fog, anything frozen seems to melt as soon as it touches the ground.

The Seventh Oregon Climate Assessment, released this week, gives empirical weight to the feeling that, regionally, our collective “best winters” are likely behind us. The report predicts longer, more severe summer droughts and heavy winter rains instead of snow, with snowfall projected to decline 50% by 2100 at current warming rates. 

It details regional temperatures rising by five degrees in the next 50 years, and 7.6 degrees by the end of the century.

In a community where a few degrees mark the difference between winter wonderland and puddles of mud, we’ll be increasingly forced to reckon with who we are if denied the conditions that warrant the title of “winter people.” How many seasons will we bus in snow for the K-9 Keg Pull or send kids up the mountain to learn to Nordic ski on trails that never quite fill in, before we admit it might not make sense anymore? 

How many winters will we manufacture snow on a mountain that increasingly gets doused with rain? Perhaps most poignantly, who are we to be in a mountain town without snow?

When I saw An Inconvenient Truth it was from a sticky seat in an air-conditioned community theater in Boulder, Colo. I remember feeling shocked by the clarity of the argument — the imminent nature of global warming — but not actually that worried about it coming to fruition. I believed science would prevail; that solutions would emerge or be forged from the same human force that created the Industrial Revolution and the internet. 

I had faith that our drive toward making improvements in our world, our capitalist instincts to make our lives easier and more efficient, and our compulsion to increase our convenience at all costs would certainly be applied to a rapidly changing planet. Because what is more inconvenient than asphyxiating on our own noxious fumes?

But now, I wonder if convenience has become our downfall instead of our engine — if the answers to the planet’s problems demand sacrifices we’re unwilling to make, regardless of the consequences. As ​​we continue to trade long-term preservation for short-term ease, the price is measured not only in snowfalls and degrees but in the pieces of ourselves that disappear with them. 

Winters, once full of snow and possibility, grow increasingly tenuous, slipping through our grasp like melting flakes on a warm palm. With each season that passes, with each solution moving further from viable, we’re left with all the large and small changes to which we’re tasked with growing accustomed. 

Perhaps the lesson lies as I did in my childhood snowsuit in the palace I built out of a frozen snow bank. The joy was in the making, in the work of shaping my world with the tools I already had. Maybe that’s what we’ve forgotten — or it’s a lesson that’s scary to confront. To save what remains, we must stop waiting for future solutions and tomorrow’s interventions, instead, picking up our shovels and getting to work.

Emily Erickson is a writer and business owner with an affinity for black coffee and playing in the mountains. Connect with her online at www.bigbluehat.studio.