winter

Winter has returned to Rochester. Now the forecast is snow every day, following a freakish few weeks of midwinter springtime—positive temperatures, no snow on the ground—that was sufficiently prolonged and sufficiently mild to have people actually talking about being scared. "If this gift horse might have global warming up its throat," I think Rob quipped, "Then it's worth looking." I was moved to ponder what Rachel Carson's book would have been titled had it been about global warming. It's wrong extrapolate from such short term anomalies, but still—it was bizarre and it was wonderful.

Though I favor the snow and even the winter coziness—in place of the garish, vital vulgarity of summertime—I do feel its hold, the way it instills pangs of desperation, the way its omnipresense pulls us into a struggle to find things to do, to keep things interesting. Objectively it's beautiful, but psychologically it's sapping. Last week ironically I worried that I'd missed Winter with the hot tub; this week it's savagely frustrating owning but not posessing the thing, navigating the hoops of getting it transported and installed. Hot tub. Our best hope.

Last night Bree grew restless and we went out for a walk, first driving to the Eastman House, where on the front lawn are planted more than a dozen huge prints of Malibu sunrises. You'd think the juxtaposition novel. California sunrise, over ocean. Planted in snow, night time. But at midnight the prints were illuminated by the sickly glow of the sodium vapor lamps over the highway, and frost behind the plastic obscurred the images. And, as a photographer with similar work in Berkeley quipped, as if to absolve himself of the indictment: What self-respecting photographer photographs the sunset? We moved on.

The other day I was guided to the most amazing place, and we went there this time—an old warehouse overlooking a railroad switching yard, an old warehouse now filled with everything you can imagine. Students and artists rent out the spaces. There seems to be all manner of things there. Glass casting, metal working, print shop, and other installations more mysterious. Best of all you can climb up to the roof and spend the hours gazing out over the urban expanse of the city, from a bunker watching the secret lives of locomotives as they assemble trains.

Berkeley Hedonists

I once joined an organisation known as "the Berkeley Hedonists."

You'd think the name redundant, and you'd be right, though this tribe practiced its craft with a particularly earnest and thorough dedication.

I didn't know, of course, what I was joining. I'd have been scared to death, of course, of such an organisation—I was a freshman on campus, and though I'd thrown myself into Berkeley and its nerdly pursuits all at once and with great vigor, but nothing like this, so far as I knew. Berkeley had yet to do its work on me.

They didn't say, not at first, that this was just one tentacle of an international organisation, and that this tentacle was officially known as the Berkeley Hedonists.

On weekends, in the rain, they took us out on a pursuit that was not, at its surface, very pleasurable. Over and over again, in the rain, we carried heavy things, ran and ran, threw ourselves into the mud. Mentors mentored the inductees, provided patient guidance. These mentors had once gone through the same process. We sought the coveted first rank.

Occassionally this organisation threw parties. I went to one. Arriving was bewildering. In the barbecue roasted a choice piece of meat, a leg of lamb, I think, and that leg of lamb received the tenderest lovingest care I have ever witnessed be bestowed upon a thing to be eaten. Every few minutes, seemingly for hours, sauces were painstakingly applied, with a gentle brush. Eventually it was served, the atmosphere suddenly of deep reverence and anticipation. The tribe had gathered to savour this feast and with a great, gathered delicateness and deliberateness commenced in the consumption of this treasured delicacy. I would not eat it, though—after all these hours on the grill, the meat to me still seemed uncooked. I would learn, of course. There was a hot tub, of course, and much nudeness. Pretty girls in nothing but a t-shirt, hot tub soakers wearing nothing of all, of course. There was an abundance of beer, too (supplied by the students), and other intoxicants, none of which would be remarkable except that I had not yet ever consumed any of this, and so they, too, in their presence, conferred bewilderment. At some point the first rank was conferred upon most of us students.

All of this was secondary to their principle craft, however, the craft towards which we toiled in the rain and in the mud on the weekends, carrying heavy things and flinging ourselves at the ground.

That craft was flying, flying under our own power.

In the mountains.

They spoke with reverence about the summertime and the trips to the mountains where we would, if we were diligent and persistent in our lessons, we would soar.

There would be feasts on the ground, of course, when the day's flying was through. Luxurious baths in the hot springs of the Eastern Sierra under starlit skies, too. But still, the principal thing was the flying, that was the goal they led us through. After the many arduous lessons, flight would be the esctatic reward.

Unfortunately I was not diligent with the lessons. Other pursuits distracted me, and in that land of plenty, there was no reason to be in a hurry, no reason to conserve—it was all there. But when I move back to Berkeley, I'll stand in line to be their student once again. This is a club, like so many other things, I suspect exists nowhere else in the world.