The Worst Day of the Year

Some years ago, a British researcher, Cliff Arnall, came up with a formula that he claimed enabled him to calculate the worst day of the year. The formula (and it is a formula, looking on the page like a bit of algebra gone wrong) will usually locate the worst day of the year on the last Monday in January. It makes sense: this date always comes up because it's distant enough from Christmas that the cozy glow is gone--but not the Christmas shopping bills, which will have now stacked to their greatest height. The weather is cold and gray, spring isn't even a rumor, and New Year's resolutions have either sputtered out comically or gone down in flames.

Like Punxsutawney Phil, the Groundhog Day groundhog, and people who celebrate Festivus (For the Rest of Us), Arnall's formula has become a filler item that turns up in the news every year. You would not think a formula would work for something like that; you would think, in fact, that it should work about as well as the groundhog's shadow does in predicting spring. But my own response to Arnall, every year, is, "Yeah, that's about right."

But his system is not perfect. My own low point traditionally comes in the middle of February. Like, right now. That today is Valentine's Day doesn't help matters; this, I've always thought, is one of those holidays that exists mainly because the candy and greeting card companies want it to (Mother's Day is the other obvious entry on what is actually a long list of such holidays). The weather outside is kind of crummy, and I want to get back into the mountains. Into Yellowstone especially, but I would hardly object to Yosemite.

Still, I can't complain, especially when I think about the winters I had during the years I worked in Yellowstone. Contract dates for jobs in Yellowstone tend to end between mid-August and mid-September. Later in my career there, my own dates might run through mid-October, but still, that left a dreadfully long gap between then and my return in May. Why the big gap? The snow, of course; as I write this, travel in Yellowstone requires an over-snow vehicle, or skis or snowshoes (I wonder--has anyone ever tried dogsleds?). For half of fall and all of winter and much of spring, I was cast adrift.

Once, I fetched up in Death Valley, which I will have to write about at greater length sometime; first, I'll have to make a return trip to the valley and find out if it is still as--let us say challenging as it used to be. The landscape was, of course, sere, blasted, amazingly harsh. When we got up in the morning, we checked our shoes for scorpions. The air was so dry that it sucked all the moisture out of my face and put a crease on one cheek that has never gone away; it looks like a scar from a duel, a duel with sabers. Usually I enjoy this sort of thing, but all I could think about was getting back to Yellowstone.

Once, I fetched up in Texas, in a town on the lower edge of the Hill Country. The town, like so many farm communities, was half-dead from economic sclerosis. The Hill Country, though, you could not call dead in any sense. I wandered through it with friends, scrambling over the granite domes at Enchanted Rock State Park and floating down the Guadalupe River like Huckleberry Finn in sunglasses. We spent a fair amount of time exploring the caves that fissure the region, deep clefts filled with odd creatures (scorpions among them) and stunning formations. It was a grand adventure--and I hated it. I wanted to be back in Yellowstone.

Once, I fetched up in southeastern New Mexico, in a place that had it all. We were close to the high mountains around Ruidoso and Cloudcroft (lovely name, that). We were not far from Guadalupe Mountains National Park, one of the hidden jewels of the park system. We were surrounded by beautiful desert. This place was the last straw. I missed Yellowstone so much that I arranged to bring the winter exile to an end for good. My way of doing so was by going back to graduate school.

Obviously, I didn't handle it well. These days, I have ways of coping with the winter morale slide. I wrote this entry a few days ago, in a little shack in the hills above the town of Inverness, California, right on the edge of Point Reyes National Seashore. I have written about the place before (twice, actually, here and here). We did the things we usually do. We let the kids play on Drakes Beach, the favored destination of Bay Area people who just want to goof around on the sand. Later, while Dustin and Lewis were in the visitor center that the National Park Service runs here, I walked as far down the beach as I could go, heading west into the sun. I was searching the sand and rocks along the high tide line, looking for interesting junk, when I chanced to look up just in time. Directly ahead of me on the beach, maybe thirty feet away, was a thing like a boulder or fifteen feet of old growth trunk, but alive with rippling flesh and fat. It raised its head, picking its leathery proboscis up off the sand; it was not, however, interested enough to look me over. It was an elephant seal, and might have weighed as much as five thousand pounds. I had never been this close to such a creature before; I thought first of Yellowstone bison (which, however, weigh maybe a third as much), and was happy that elephant seals do not move as fast as the bison do. There was a trail in the sand where the seal had hauled out of the water, and crushed sand on either side where he had lolled back and forth and used his flipper to scoop sand and pour it all over himself. A mile or two ahead of me on the beach was the stretch that has been taken over by the seals as the site of a breeding colony, but I never got close to it. Still, by the end of my walk, I had seen nine of them.

We went hiking the afternoon we arrived, climbing up and over the ridge that bisects the peninsula and down toward Tomales Bay, which is itself essentially a rift zone created by the San Andreas Fault. The whole of Northern California was being soaked by the first storm since the start of January. The treetops were lost in mist, which poured off the Pacific, over the ridgeline, and all around us. The rain was, for an hour or so, not hard, but every breath of wind shook water loose from the trees and dumped bulging drops on us by the hundreds. The forest was dense, the foliage so thoroughly soaked that it pulled the branches down until, though long stretches, we had to hike bent over. We were quickly soaked. My socks were all wet and knotted up around my toes. Lewis, our two year old, was trying to make the hike without recourse to his jogging stroller. We take him on these outings because we know that, if we don't, later in life he will just want to stay inside at the computer or some other glowing screen. Now, we were facing an opposite but related danger: that he might come to regard hiking as one of those loony things mom and dad were into. They stopped, and I hiked on to see how far we had to go to reach our objective, the bay shore. We were, I discovered, nowhere near halfway. When I got to the bay, I couldn't see it.

So we take the good with the bad, and in the end, I don't suffer through my winters like I used to. In fact, I have come to understand that it was the winter and its tedium that sent me reeling back into graduate school; I'm in a position to enjoy things today because I didn't enjoy them then. But mainly, I've become aware that I simply have nothing to complain about.