Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

Darkness

When she was five months pregnant with her son Bert, May went to Tromsø, Norway to cross the Arctic Circle and see the Northern Lights. This was because she had booked the trip in advance, when she thought that she would not be able to get pregnant naturally, due to not producing the right hormones. However, she managed to show up to an IVF clinic pregnant. Five months in, she begged her midwife to sign a consent form allowing her to make the longed-for trip, especially as she felt that she was approaching the end of her independent adult life.

The cold in Tromsø was especially harsh on her pregnant body, which prioritized blood flow to the uterus and left the rest of her freezing. Still, while she was there, she learned that, contrary to the rumor that wintertime Tromsø never sees daylight, there is a sort of navy blue tinge to the sky, signaling daytime. For people who live there, “it marks a vital distinction between day and night” (160). May noted that the night lasts from about three in the afternoon to nine in the morning. After that, a dawn follows with a sliver of day before the beginning of twilight again.

May found herself unable to adapt, sleeping too long. Her pregnancy made her anxious about slipping on ice or straying too far from the hospital. She was on the hunt for the aurora borealis and found that it was “pale, evanescent, but tangible in a way that I hadn’t expected” (161). This contrasts with the vibrant media images that have been enhanced with long exposure times.

They went on a trip to Whale Island to meet an Indigenous Sámi family and their reindeer. The Sámi are the only people who are allowed to own reindeer in Norway. Sámi territory expands over Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia; however, the people endured discrimination when nation-states began to form. While inequalities continue, the Sámi have their own parliaments. They live a life closely connected to nature and have a rich mythology where reindeer feature prominently. May’s own encounter with reindeer was an unexpected one. They were more creaturely than she had imagined, with moss-covered antlers and roving eyes. When they rode in a sleigh pulled by reindeer, Trine, her host called May “Mama Reindeer,” commenting that she did not yet have her antlers (169). May was moved to tears, realizing that pregnancy made her feel more vulnerable. She was inspired by the Sámi people’s rich ancestral mythology to create a personal mythology for her unborn son. May still tells Bert that he crossed the Arctic Circle before he was even born, to inspire his belief in his own strength.

Hunger

May was mesmerized by a wolf tracker she met at a party because “he had no artifice; no social nicety. Instead, he had something wild, elemental” (173). To May, this man seemed part-wolf, as though years of wolf tracking alone in the forests made him resemble the creatures he loved. Next to this unpretentious, observant man, May felt artificial and frivolous.

As a shepherd in the Greek mountains, the wolf tracker observed the farmers’ loathing of the wolves. While the wolves presented a realistic threat to livestock, the farmers’ desire to see these wild creatures eliminated stemmed from superstitions about their danger to humans and society as a whole. The farmers’ attitude is so widespread that wolf populations are being systematically killed by poisoning, trapping, and beating. May observes that “a wolf’s death is often handled with superstitious ritual, subject to an excessive thoroughness that suggests a belief that wolves have supernatural powers” (176). In medieval times, a potent type of debasement was likening someone to a wolf. In Anglo-Saxon law, outlaws became known as wulfheafod or wolf’s head. While wolves are believed to have been hunted out of extinction in the British Isles, their subtlety and gift for camouflage mean that they are likely still present. In Europe as a whole, their numbers are rising. Wolves are lean, lonely hunters who have evolved to kill more than they can eat, so that they can provide for their packs in times of famine.

If wolves are symbols of compulsive appetite and the wilderness of uncultivated land, winter awakens wolfish appetites in us. The January moon is known as the Wolf Moon and marks the time when wolves were most likely to be hungry and come to the villages seeking prey. However, it also marks the season of peak-quality wolf fur and the medieval wolf-hunting season.

During a person’s personal winters, anyone can have wolfish appetites, often for harmful substances. However, given that daily life can be lonely and dull, craving makes someone human and may even be a symbol of our survival.

Snow

In the Southeast of England where May lives, snow is a rare novelty. Still, May has vague childhood memories of the year 1987 when her village was snowbound and the electricity got cut off. She found that she enjoyed the disruption to the mundane routines of normality and did not want it to end. She still retains a fondness for snow’s transformative powers, despite and especially because of its disruptions to daily life. For May, snow is “yet another liminal space, a crossing point between the mundane and the magical,” which “offers us a whole new world, but, just as we buy into it, it’s whisked away” (192).

May believes that C. S. Lewis’s Narnia offers “the Platonic ideal of snow: a thick, white, perfect layer over pine forests and quaint cottages” (192). This sudden transformation is most desired by children, who imagine that like their favorite book protagonists, the snow will make them independent and wily enough to survive the most extreme challenges. Extraordinarily deep winters become the stuff of nostalgia, and May pines over the winter of 1963, where at the nearby Isle of Sheppey, the sea froze in waves. While she hopes that she will get to see such a spectacle in her lifetime, she is prepared for it to never to happen.

May’s son Bert has managed to live six years of his life without encountering snow, and he talks of it as though it is some fantastical creature. When a substantial snowfall finally occurs, he enjoys it in the beginning but soon gets bored of the layers of clothes and the cold exposure to his face. However, while in England, the snow causes at most a handful of days of inconvenience a year, in Hamina, a small Finnish town, where it is winter six months of the year, life must run normally through severe snowstorms and frigid temperatures. Laborious preparations such as spending a long time warming up the car in the morning and expenses such as a monthly heating bill of 2,000 pounds must be factored in. Being stranded in the snow is a real possibility, and people carry extra warm clothes and boots in their cars.

Cold Water

When May originally moved to the coast, she dreamed that she would swim all year round. However, for the first few years, her swimming record is patchy, as she only manages to do for the Whitstable New Year sea swim and on a few odd days in the summer. The difficulty of predicting the tides sees her giving up. Still, she accompanies her friend Emma on her own new year swim, and they go wetsuit swimming in water that is about three degrees Celsius or 37 degrees Fahrenheit. While the cold is “so absolute, so vicious,” May emerges from the water elated with a sparkling feeling in her veins (204).

Over Skype, May interviews Dorte Lyager, a woman who is part of the Polar Bear Club of year-round swimmers. Dorte swims every day in Jutland, in the North of Denmark. For Dorte, who struggles with bipolar disorder, cold-water swimming is a form of self-care and containment for her fraught mental processes. Dorte’s reliance on cold water for her mental health is such that she has an old agricultural tank which she uses to create an ice bath for herself during the summer.

May finds a partner in Margo Selby, a local woman committed to swimming every day of the year. This reinforces her own old commitment to cold water swimming. The two women encourage each other to stay in longer and longer and even to quit their wetsuits and remain in their normal swimsuits. She finds the experience exhilarating and feels secure, because she is sharing it with Margo. She learns to guard herself from hypothermia by using her ability to feel the cold as her barometer. She knows to get out when she feels a sharp pain across her thumb-joints.

While studies have shown that cold water immersion increases dopamine levels and contributes to a sense of well-being, for May it is “an act of defiance against our own woes. By doing a resilient thing, we felt more resilient” (217). May and her fellow swimmers remain in the present moment, projecting into neither the future nor the past. The daily changes in the sea align with this, forcing them to pay attention. However, they also find that the shared experience of cold-water swimming creates a safe environment where they can talk about their wintriest experiences. They welcome newcomers.