The groundhog sleeps through it all. When she gets going in late March, she’ll feel the same, and I will feel different. The month the groundhog wakes up, Sarah’s book tour will be canceled. Our kids’ schools will close. We will be separated from friends and family for what, at first, we think might be four weeks, or even eight.
I will suddenly become far more interested in the garden than I’ve ever been, and that spring I will learn of a solution to the great groundhog war from watching, of all things, a YouTube video. It turns out that I am not the only person to be locked in conflict with a groundhog, and another gardener suggests a radical solution that works perfectly. I till a patch of soil by the shed, and when I am done planting soybean seeds in my garden, I plant some in the groundhog’s garden. The same with the peppers and the beans.
* * *
Beginning that March, I will be outside all the time, every day, ravenous for the normalcy that I can only feel outdoors, where nature proceeds apace. I will begin to understand for the first time in my life that I am not just made for Earth, but also of it.
But we are not there yet. The menacing Spring has not yet sprouted. I dump the dead plants into a compost pile, and return the wheelbarrow to the shed. That night, Sarah and I will listen to the poet Paige Lewis read. I love Lewis’s book Space Struck for many reasons, but especially because the poems give voice and form to the anxiety that dominates so much of my life, the panic of threatening clouds and scornful groundhogs. In one poem, Lewis writes of a narrator who feels
as if I’m on the moon listening to the air hiss
out of my spacesuit, and I can’t find the hole. I’m
the vice president of panic, and the president is
missing.
* * *
In March of 1965, the cosmonaut Alexei Leonov exited the Mir space capsule and became the first human being to float freely* in space. At the end of this first spacewalk, Leonov discovered that his space suit had expanded in the vacuum of space, and he could not squeeze back into the capsule. His only choice was to open a valve in the space suit and let the air within seep into space, which shrank the suit enough that he could squeeze back into his spaceship just before his oxygen ran out. Nature is indifferent to us, but surely it did not feel that way to Alexei Leonov as he felt the air leak out and the void rush in.
I don’t believe we have a choice when it comes to whether we endow the world with meaning. We are all little fairies, sprinkling meaning dust everywhere we go. This mountain will mean God, and that precipitation will mean trouble. The vacuum of space will mean emptiness, and the groundhog will mean nature’s scorn for human absurdity. We will build meaning wherever we go, with whatever we come across. But to me, while making meaning isn’t a choice, the kind of meaning can be.
* * *
I came in from the garden. I took a shower, and the water prickled my frozen skin. I got dressed, parted my hair to the side with a comb, and drove with Sarah through a treacherous evening of wintry mix to the poetry reading. We talked about her book, and about our kids. After a while, she turned the radio on. On another night, the same weather would’ve been threatening or menacing or joyless. But not tonight. What you’re looking at matters, but not as much as how you’re looking or who you’re looking with. That night, I was with just the right person in just the right place, and I’ll be damned if the graupel wasn’t beautiful.
I give wintry mix four stars.
THE HOT DOGS OF B?JARINS BEZTU PYLSUR
IN THE SUMMER OF 2008, Sarah and I traveled to Europe with another couple, our friends Laura and Ryan. I like Laura and Ryan a lot, but one thing you need to know is that they are the sort of people who really try to suck the marrow out of life and make the most of their brief flicker of consciousness and all that stuff. This is quite different from my style of traveling, wherein I spend most of the day psyching myself up to do one thing—visit a museum, perhaps—and the rest of the day recovering from the only event on my itinerary.
The trip took us from Denmark to Sweden and then on to Iceland, a small and mostly rocky island nation in the North Atlantic that attracts tourists primarily by offering free stopovers to anyone who flies Iceland’s national airline, Icelandair. I was interested in visiting Iceland because 1. It has a population under four hundred thousand, and I’ve long been fascinated by tiny nations and how they make it work, and 2. My longtime publisher Julie Strauss-Gabel is a frequent visitor to Iceland and had vociferously recommended a certain hot dog stand in Reykjavík.*
The trips to Sweden and Denmark had been lovely. There were smorgasbords and museums, but the highlight had been an evening spent with Ryan’s Swedish relatives, who lived on the shores of some endless lake in the wilderness. They welcomed us to their home and proceeded to get us blisteringly, unprecedentedly drunk on Sweden’s national liquor, br?nnvin. I do not often drink to excess, because I have an intense fear of hangovers, but I made an exception that evening. Ryan’s relatives taught us Swedish drinking songs, and they taught us how to eat pickled herring, and my glass kept getting filled with br?nnvin until at last the eighty-year-old patriarch of the family stood up and spoke his first English words of the evening: “UND NOW VEE SAUNA!”
So we got in the sauna and I was so drunk that I was pouring cold beer over my head to stay cool in the sauna, and then after a while Sarah and I stepped outside and walked knee-deep into the lake. The eighty-year-old patriarch whose name was I think Lasse joined us, and he was standing there completely nude, next to the ridiculously modest Americans in their bathing suits. And then Lasse clapped me on the back in what was intended to be a firm gesture of camaraderie. Unprepared for the strength of his embrace, I fell face-first into the lake. I was uninjured but my glasses were thoroughly and irreparably scratched from an encounter with the rocks in the lake bed. The next morning I woke up reminded that my abject fear of hangovers is fully warranted, and also unable to see much on account of the gouged glasses.
* * *
By the time we arrived in Reykjavík, Iceland, two days later, I was still hungover, which for me always means a sour churning in the left side of my abdomen combined with a general desire to dissolve into the landscape. This is the real crux of a hangover for me—alcohol consumption increases my vulnerability to despair. I understood that it was only the hangover talking, but the hangover does talk rather loudly.
Hangovers also make me quite sensitive to light, which would’ve been a problem except that it was a hideously gray morning when we landed in Reykjavík, not just overcast but misty. It was one of those days where you realize that “sky” is just another human construct, that the sky starts wherever the ground ends. Sky isn’t just something way up out there, but also something that your head is swimming in all the time.
We took a taxi from the airport into the city of Reykjavík, Iceland’s largest （and really only） city. The cab driver was listening to some kind of Icelandic talk radio that was turned up entirely too loud, and I was squeezed between Sarah and Laura in the backseat. As we entered the city, I was struck mostly by its eerie silence. There was not a single person out on the streets, even though the weather wasn’t that bad. It was a Friday in summer, and I had imagined a small city where people walked all day to the butcher and the baker and the candlestick maker or whatever. Instead, the town was utterly still.