In the Minor Key

On stagnation, on inertia, on sails without wind.

It’s been snowing for days and for the hundred millionth time I’ve questioned my allegiance to the Far North. Other than two trips to the gym to blunt the lion’s paw of time, I’ve refused to leave the house. (Chump, I know.) From the couch I just keep stuffing my face with cold unsalted potatoes while longing for an urban lark in Tucson. Sadly I’ve never been to the border city, but if it’s anything like the Deep South there is a vibrancy to life there that right now I could use a good dose of as I feel trapped within an Ingmar Bergman film where every character battles insanity and pleads to the Almighty who brandishes a bullwhip made of hot stars.

The Far North can torment you well into May, especially here in the high country of Montana. I’ve seen it snow on my birthday, the thirteenth of June, and once on July the third, another time on July the forth, and that same summer I remember a big snow storm battering the mountains for two or three days in August during which my old lad Mark and I were driving home from a futile elk scout, the knobby wheels of his Ford pickup yammering over the asphalt while he told me about the epic garden he was able to grow in the warmer zone of eastern Oregon during a former life.

He had a hollow look to his eyes because there is typically a certain effervescence to summers, but that one was chilly and already on the fritz and truth be told he had detonated a grenade on his marriage and was paying the tolls. It didn’t help him—or me—that only forty-five days had passed between the last wood fire of winter and the first one of autumn. This is not ideal weather for those of us prone to melancholy and overthinking.

Miss FPJ and I recently watched The Banshees of Inisherin, which is an excellent film, but all the wide angle shots of coastal Ireland floating in a bleak Atlantic filled us with mutual dread. It didn’t matter to me that the pastures were a permanent green or that the music was delightful, the whole visual aspect and the underlying tension between people being partisan and tribal put me in a minor key. At times I hate the North Country with its climatological hostilities and I long for lemons and ecstasy or just the plain pop of a cork on a fruity, salty, intensely mineralized wine bottled where moisture hardly falls. My pet fantasy of relocating to the Mediterranean is admittedly entering its fourth year of phantasmagoric immateriality, albeit there is an undeniable medicinal benefit to durable optimisms considering that life is full of mule kicks to the solar plexus. Also nobody wants to bunk with a sourpuss.

Montana sees many millions of visitors every year who always return home for solid reasons, and those who emigrate from sunnier nearby states last on average three years before tucking tail. Not to be bleak, but our statewide suicide rates are often the highest in the nation, a sad deal that I’m able to sense in the interminable grasslands where the earth seems particularly indifferent to humans.¹ Years ago a friend of mine made her living on a nearby ranch until she relocated to New Mexico, land of bright light. Surprised that she departed so suddenly, I asked her why and she said that the North is cold and lonely, an assessment I find fair. However if you are a claustrophobe it is possible to live almost two-hundred miles from the nearest Starbucks—more than twice the distance from Cuba to Florida.

I’m an amateur scholar so don't take my word for it, but the American South produces the nation’s best writers simply because the weather is better. Northern books tend toward the lugubrious and they are generally slim on humor while being quite stark. The pattern holds true globally as well. It’s impossible to imagine Don Quixote slogging through grim Danish forests, but it is clear why Beowulf threw himself into Walden pond to kill the mother of all monsters. Latitude possibly explains why the Norsemen made war and scarfed fistfuls of magic mushrooms and hit the orgies and the sacrifices every month. Flamenco, which is my speed, could never be a passion of the dark fjords since joyful expression is predominately an outgrowth of genial climates. Can you picture some berserker gnawing on bananas at the local cabana standing up shouting, Summer is coming!

The temptation to turn frustration into a philosophical system asserts itself every spring when our weather is diabolically bipolar, though if you manage to get out of dodge the presence of totally different ranges of mountains and flora and fauna becomes a lifeline to the brain mired in a wet bed of slush. A mere ten hour drive to the south of here to Utah the geography is so inverted that waking up there after the hefty drive feels like interplanetary travel. Honestly I’ve never seen a more fascinating topography than down in Utah. I really should get myself there, but for explicable reasons of neural pruning we tend to repeat ourselves when what we desperately need is to shake things up. This is precisely where I’m at, a grown man in diapers wizened by shoulder season doldrums.

I’ve been feeling flat of late. Work has been annihilating me mainly because it is just work rather than something I wake up excited to do each day, and given my long history as a failed Catholic I’m prone to excessive periods of self-castigation wherein I overly examine all of my life decisions, my intellect, and on a brighter note the limitations of my adolescent conditioning, which assuming a degree of awareness can be overridden with intentional efforts. Nobody wants to feel as if their own life is something out there ahead of them that they can never catch.

It doesn’t help that I have not been sleeping well in recent days, but Miss FPJ says she is also experiencing a sense of flatness. Just this morning as she was packing for a trip to Pittsburgh, PA she told me that there is no “logical reason for such a state of being.” I begged to differ. Stagnation is bonafide. When we are in a rut our brains power down due to boredom and predictability, becoming literally less nimble and excitable in direct proportion to the roteness of the days. My work isn’t terrible, but I can tell that I’m suffocating when by midday Saturday I’m overcome with a sense of foreboding. Though this may be a symptom not the issue. There are seasons in life when you drop into low gear.

All in all, I’m in a kind of no man’s land where fatigue is easy to confuse for unhappiness. It’s almost May and it is twenty-three degrees, which stings. I’m also older now, midlife, too keenly aware that as much as I want to go back to a younger version brimming with Brownian energy and all the gargantuan opportunities the poltergeist of youth allows for, that passage is gone. Rue it I do, a little here and there. I don’t go in for the Stoic aspiration to avoid nostalgia because I’m not a machine, and feelings are part of writing, part of our condition.

I use the past to gauge the present and to set up the future. What do I need? Who do I need? Year over year what endures is family and friends. I miss the former, my dad especially. He knows things, so deep down inside what this nadir is maybe about is the troubling fact that we each live on an earth full of looming absences. They ache. They can make you feel a long way away, as if you are waiting for something you know is coming but you can’t stop it. Meanwhile from the gutter the best option is to grind the gears, to make plans for mountain rips, to buy the ticket and take the ride. Though this winter was easy weatherwise, one arrives at forks in the road. Where to go from there is a question of values.

1. Given the sentence to which this footnote is attached, you may get reductionist impressions about its topic, but one of the best books I’ve read in my many years of reading is Abe Streep’s Brothers on Three. If you loved basketball at any point in your life, it’s a gem. If you have or will have teenagers, it’s a gem. It’s just a gem, period.