A good friend of mine has a hypothesis that climate is what causes people to be what they are. I recently visited him in Miami and had a chance to test his hypothesis against my own boosterism for the New England winter. Much to my surprise I found myself changed, less fond of winter, more drawn to the even luxury of a mild and seductive climate. For the short time I was there I lost the tension between opposites we call "virtue" in New England, and it felt good.
Miami has an ocean that is not a New Hampshire ocean at all. Rarely disturbed by waves because of its coral latticework of reefs, its pastel colors have a kind of lambency to them: the clear sandy bottoms glimmer up through an aquamarine as deft and bubbled as fine Venetian glass. This is an ocean that will not harm you; it will only give you soothe and calm. And people who live near it and on it pick up these qualities, easy-going and seemingly unflustered by the darker troublesome questions in life. The ocean is full of food that can be brought up as easily as the desire to catch it, and a person can eat that night the sweet flesh that was swimming unhindered during the day. Such delicate immediacy, such soft-hearted disregard for the future. And the sun!! It rained for a few days while I was there, but when the sun came out it was like a kiss on a scraped knee. The sun was like a vitamin, soaking through the pores into blood, leaching out accumulated fatigue.
All of this threw me, the committed Thoreauvian, into confusion. Suddenly my body didn't believe in the supposedly clarifying rigors of snow and ice and chopped wood. It gave itself over easily to ocean and the sun. I began to take on some of that sliding ease, that casual indifference to the struggle to make meaning. I liked drifting through the currents, full of nothing more substantial than gesture and arabesque.
The success of my friend's hypothesis made me wonder where the roots of character really reside. But I know I have to go back to Miami in December, back to that lightened sense of living. I love the spare beauty of a New Hampshire winter as much as anyone, but we need relief from this long season of mortality, some salutary amnesia about that dark ocean breaking on the frozen beach. We have to remember that there is no virtue in being cold. Miami's ocean in December is the pre-apple Eden; our ocean is post-nibble. I found in the easy brilliance of that easy ocean a recall to health and optimism. But it's difficult to export that feeling back to this weather full of necessity and overcoats. My internal climate has changed, now full of mauve water and the lure of the Keys.
Christmas Passed Up
Sliding