Ammi Midstokke: The winter that never was

The calendar says it is winter, but it has not arrived at my house yet. There’s some amorphous white debris in my yard, a lumpy, crusty sprawl of no real substance. Every day, I calculate the value loss of my ski pass.

All my friends are going to Canada to ski, though I suspect they are actually looking at real estate. If they wait a few months, we’ll probably just invade the place for its health care and natural resources.

The good news is that the trails have achieved their maximum-danger-threat level. Between frost heaves, ice slicks and slush puddles, it feels like some sort of military training to go out there and run.

I won’t be surprised if I get recruited soon. I can already live on cardboard energy bars, chase off bears and believe poutine to be an abomination to arteries and good taste.

Also, I never liked Bryan Adams or Alanis Morisette, but am willing to accept Joni Mitchell and Neil Young.

There is a place at the edge of the Salmo-Priest Wilderness where one can see a view of where Canada took a giant razor to a twenty-foot wide strip of land.

Perhaps they are responsible for 3.048 meters, while the U.S. weeds the other ten feet. It stretches over five thousand miles across the land, over mountains, through towns, over waterways and roadways and always from one side of the country to the other.

I chuckle at what the Indigenous people must have thought, watching us white folks out there with our landscape Sharpies, drawing lines of mine and yours (or mostly just mine).

It’s comical to see a force like nature be etched with the pencil mark of humanity. The gods must be up there in their cosmic thrones laughing at the unexpected outcomes of this experiment. I imagine them, their golden-sandaled feet held in the plush carpet of clouds:

“Well that’s curious …”

“Are they seriously drawing a line across a continent? Were our obvious boundaries of water and mountains not clear enough?”

We cut through those with roads and tunnels, and built over them with bridges and bypasses.

And now we have to create new underpasses for the wildlife migrations, and manage light pollution for the birds, and argue about the best ways to make electricity by robbing one or another natural resource.

What if we just – and I know this is radical, heretic thinking here – used less of it? What if we used less of everything: drove our cars less, flew airplanes less, ate meat less, used AC less, made less trash, bought less stuff. And for the love of sanity: watched less news. Scrolled less doom.

We’d have more money to spend on books, which are a conservationist’s concession, though they are reusable as reading material until they are worn enough to suffice as camper’s toilet paper and fire starter. That alone makes them superior to an electronic reader, if you ask me.

We cannot continue ignoring the problem or waiting for legislation or administration to change: This is a problem that requires each of us (because each of us is part of the problem) to participate in the solution.

So while we’re all complaining about the loss of our white Christmases and wallowing in the nostalgia of frozen lakes (except for that one year all the ducks got stuck in the ice and died), perhaps we could consider all the tiny ways in which we contribute, whether through consumerism or complacency. And then change.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com