Chasing Winter

The cold has a way of simplifying things.  For a quarter of the year, everything is muted gray.  The skies deliver lackluster in panorama form.  Budding plants fall ill, withering to bones.  The flowers and the bees have blown away with the wind and all that’s left is the biting, unaccented winter.

I enjoy this bleakness.  So much so, I’ve come to seek it out perpetually.  When the first days of spring arrive, my bags have already been packed.  The boarding pass is in my breast pocket and i’m leaving footprints atop the remaining pockets of cold earth.  It isn’t a matter of holiday travel.  There are no island-print shirts in my luggage, no sandals, no sun-shielding hats.  Winter coats, scarves, boots, coffee beans ready for roasting, matches, extra socks, mittens - these have become my essentials.

This doesn't mean I neglect the ocean fronts, nor any parts of the landscape coveted for its warmth and hospitality.  When I stand on the shores, watching heavy crashing waves, my nose is clean of sunblock.  When I dip my toes, it is out of violent curiosity and I’m rewarded with seething chills that swarm up my backside.  The sky bleeds an indistinguishable gray blood and it connects with the horizon seamlessly.  My eyes have adjusted for this flat palate.  They don’t search for brilliant points.  No oasis can distract me from whatever drab environment I’ve landed in.

Some people lust for these very same bright points, the ones of which I have evaded for many years now.  They ogle over the petals of sunflowers, over the cheerful blue of a summer sky, over red robins and their midday rowdiness.  You see, these visual stimulus are unimportant to me.  It’s not that I don’t appreciate the rainbow, or the assortment of flavors grown on the limbs of trees, I do, indeed.  But I prefer simplicity, the lack of pigment, the harshness of winds and relentlessness of overcast.

My brain, the way it’s wired, is not meant for constant external stimulation.  At night I dream as vivid as wildfire.  Walking down the street, umbrella overhead, I step over kaleidoscope puddles.  Rain drops synchronize with guitar melodies.  I’ve quite the imagination I tell you.  Almost otherworldly.  It could very well be overwhelming, coupled with the wrong environment.  Although, in bleakness it thrives.  It is allowed infinite canvas on which it can print whatever it desires.  Quite cold offers an extraordinary backdrop on which my strange brain can flick paint.  You see, the winter, for me, is an unsullied coloring book.  It is only natural that I am drawn to it.

For years now, I have traveled, counterintuitively, from winter to winter.  For most people, this would be a depressing itinerary.  But for me, it is the suitable option.  Moving against the tide, not in a contrived way, but out of true desire, has its benefits.  Hotels, apartments are never at capacity during these frigid gray months.  I’ve not once been turned away for sake “no vacancy.”  Traffic, across the globe, during these muted months, is not an intimidating factor.  It’s as if entire communities fall into hibernation, leaving me with free reign, a key to an abandoned city.  

At most, I’m punished for hours or days by delayed flights.  Snowy runways and frozen engine blocks have dampened my pursuit, but only temporarily.  It’s a small price of adversity to pay for the openness that awaits me.

Surely I am judged as a troglodyte for my style of living.  Anyone who seeks out colorless regions, black ice, storms - we are looked at as having a certain hostility.  This may be true for some, but I assure you it is not the case for all.  Being bundled and adrift amongst the wolves, doesn’t make one a devouring beast himself.  It may put him against a background that brings forth such ideas, but these are just that, ideas.  Without the distraction of constant, warm buzzings, ideas are more tangible.  They present themselves double, even triple-time.  They come with such frequency that it is all one can do to allow them into his head and repurpose them into wild things, paintings, stories, entire novels.  This, I tell you, is the allure that will forever bring me back to winter.