Comfort… Spelled with an ‘Umm’
- Ann Cognito
- Oct 18, 2021
- 7 min read
The chorus of frogs and and bugs no longer serenades Skoro in the evenings (with intermittent flyswatter percussion). The butterflies are gone and the few bees still out and about are sluggish. The squirrels are too busy stowing their provisions to be partying in the greenspaces and getting rambunctious in the trees.
They’re changing into their cold weather mode and retreated to their winter spots.
I warmed up my socks on top of the kettle this morning before putting them on. Ditto my toque, and I’d’ve done with other pieces if I’d thought of it sooner!
On the other hand… that would create too much condensation and I’d be running around half dressed drying my boat while turning bluer than she is. Besides, get dressed quick and it’s all good. Wakes me up. It’s too chilly for scrubbing the decks, though, and the internet’s too iffy for charts or anything, so I’m writing again. The hatch is ¾ shut to keep the wind out, I’m bundled and wearing boot. Mr Myrtle Turtle Squirtle, the Jamaican climate gypsy puppy, did finally have to leave his nest of blankies for a bit, but he did that in record time and has turned back into a fuzzy blanket snail.
So the boat’s cold, but we’re warm, and we’d both rather be on our sailboat than anywhere else.
My sporadic email penpal friend lives on a sailboat.
His sailboat is even smaller than Skoro.
He’s in Washington, usually, I think, though he wanders pretty freely. When his boat (or he) needs some time on solid ground (which isn’t all that often), he does his wandering with a really good folding bicycle and an equally excellent tent.
Granted, he’s generally in a somewhat warmer piece of the world than Mr Myrtle and I, but it’s still winter, and winter on a small low tech boat is not a toasty time. These marvels of fibreglass and dacron are made with inspiration, not insulation. They can do a lot of beautiful things, but they can’t really even contain the heat from your own body, and any heat it does hold will cause a boatload of condensation… yes, boats are made to be wet — on the outside. Being wet on the inside causes problems no matter how it happens. And then you get colder.
I think, from my all too infrequent wanderings through his blog, that he might be going indoors this winter, but not because of weather, and who knows what page he’ll be on next. His itinerary is as fluid as the water it’s written with and he wouldn’t trade his boat or his life or his freedom for anything.
I don’t know how many times I’ve read him as he types buried in the berth of his little fibreglass bubble, steeling himself to meet the frigid day beyond the blankets, and the reality of weather.
Somewhere, the guys who bought Betty, the little trailer I stopped fixing up in favour of the sailboat, are moving from their boat to the trailer for winter. You can do a lot to winterize a trailer, but it’s still a far cry from what many folks would consider ‘comfortable’… but they bought Betty because that kind of comfort is beyond the reality of what they consider enough for winter.
I met a woman at one of the campgrounds I stayed at while walking to Ottawa. She was busy all that chilly, early, grey September morning, working around what was clearly a long term camp… a whirlwind in a plaid lumberjack shirt and solid boots, chopping wood and starting a fire and carrying water and boiling it and other camp work. She paused for breakfast, cooked on and eaten by her warm fire – and then she spun into her tent and spun out again dressed in a well-made and well-fitting slim-skirted black power suit with immaculate pumps.
The only answer as to why which she had time for as she doused the fire on her way to the law office where she practices – “it’s real.”
My Helmsperson coming up the Rideau visits close e-friends who live in alternate ways. Coming here was the second such trip – we were e-friends long before we finally met in person, in 2019, and that was at her place, because I was on the road.
The first visit was to a friend who lives in a tiny tiny cabin in Colorado — at an altitude where the air and weather discourages pretty much everything except what really belongs there… trees, most visibly, and those who naturally inhabit such places as part of them, seen little even by each other.
That’s why they live there. They belong there, as part of it. And they’ll be there as part of it when the temperatures and seas rise, far above much of the chaos and collapse. Living as they do, they’ll be largely unaffected in the ways many of us will be, and that’s another good reason to call this beautiful vast sanctuary home… but the weather will change, undeniably. Winter will change, its bonechilling threat replaced by a new reality.
Mr Myrtle and I will have our own new winter reality soon – back in a tent again. We’ve got a much better tent and arrangement now though, and will actually be warmer there in the depths of winter than here right now aboard our floating abode. Boats are not made to live in during harsh winters; they need to hibernate. We don’t need much, but the tent will be cozy and will keep enough of the reality of weather at bay to be well.
In spring, we’ll come back to Skoro, and we’ll head towards other parts of the world, and other kinds of weather… weather where we can both be healthier, and where our home doesn’t need to hibernate half the year because of weather.
The weather next year is not unlikely to be crazier than this year, though. The conditions of the climate crisis are escalating all around us… and we sit, like doomed frogs underestimating the reality of the pot they’re in.
I’ll warm my socks on a pot but I won’t sit in it.
I hate being frozen as much as any frog; my blood doesn’t work right, my brain doesn’t work right, everything hurts, and I feel like one of those ancient frost-burnt loaves of barely recognizable bread that sometimes get found at the bottom of the deepfreeze.
But I live here – I don’t expect to be warm, and surrounded by warmth, throughout the year. Actually, I’d expect to be colder at this point in the year, but that reality is already gone. At any rate, I just don’t expect anything to be terribly warm in this part of the world and this part of the year. And it does weird things to my system to shift back and forth as so many of us do, out of our nests, into the cold, back into the central heating and ubiquitous lighting, back out to the weather… so I’ll live in my cozy tent, where I can hear the Earth and stars and know that everything changes.
We spend a truly mindboggling amount of time, energy, money, and resources denying the reality of weather, on a personal level and collectively.
The reality of weather… how do we think we can get a handle on a collapsing ecosystem when we’ve completely lost the basic ability to deal with plain old everyday weather???
We are the only living thing on Earth unable to manage, or even accept the reality of, weather. Adapting to weather is, for all intents and purposes, no longer part of being human. We devolved.
The ability to adapt to climate, then, is probably largely out of the question.
However… I remember reading a study and talking about it with my son, so it must have been 14 or 15 years ago. Researchers had found the structure of the human hand – in general, across populations and geography – to be significantly different than it had been until only a couple generations previous to the study, and now that’s how all the new-model humans are built. It is apparently the fastest documented evolutionary change in human history.
The human hand has evolved to more effectively manage a cell phone. Truth. The thumb is now positioned differently and the nonskeletal structures function differently. It happened that fast.
And that was a non-survival change. I’m not academically or medically qualified to say what that means in relation to the plethora of changes we’d need to survive a few generations longer, or longer than that if the planet does, but I am certainly qualified to wonder what could happen if we focus as much attention on meeting current global ecosystem requirements as upon current cellphone requirements.
The planet might change enough for some life to survive.
The future will change.
The weather will always change.
We can’t avoid the realities of weather any more, and certainly not the realities of the climate crisis… but we can change, too. We can stop investing so much in denying the reality of weather and start accepting change. So many already are. What we though was ‘comfort’ isn’t as comfortable as we thought, in a lot of ways… maybe we just need to change out definition of comfort to include reality rather than denial. When expectations change, reality changes.
With hope and determination,
Ann
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Skoro and Mr Myrtle and I will change our lives in accordance with the winter weather, but this project is far from hibernating – I have a boatload of planning to do, charts and distances and whatnot for a good long distance into the future… and a pile more… part of which includes scraping together a budget for repairs and gear and the trip. If you can help change the budget, I can keep helping try to change the world.
Sporadic and one-time support through Chuffed, at
Ongoing support via Patreon (I’m still having trouble posting there, my apologies), at
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Recent weatherific photos from hereabouts… reheating my socks and toque, the ‘bin-mini’ (miniature fake bimini cockpit cover made from a precariously perched bin lid), some fog, and a frog, more abstract-art-pattern leaves in the water, a sluggish bee who waved at me, and an unseasonally green tree (they all ought to on the opposite side of the spectrum by now, if wearing any foliage at all)… my favourite plaid shirt being rained on in the dark when I thought it would be dry by morning because the weather app said so and my weather-senses have devolved like the rest of us, an incredible rainy sunset I was blessed to accidentally witness, and of course, Mr Myrtle, world famous climate gypsy puppy, sniffing the leaves, and the breeze… and the blankies…
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