Winter drains the color from the world, turns the horizon to a monochrome ranging from pure black to a dusty blue-white. Even the evergreens seem more darkness and shadow than color. When I lived in Massachusetts I always found January the hardest month to get through. Here in Northern Wisconsin I'd pick February. January nights are still too long to offer any glimpse of hope, and hope is what makes life difficult, because hope is the feeling that things will be better than they are right now. Without hope you remain resigned to now. Hope reminds you that now is not good. I don't mind the cold, or even the snow really, but all of it, combined with the darkness, is not my idea of a good time. I understand some people love it, which is great for them. They are welcome to it. I prefer to spend winter on the beaches of Florida, hiking the deserts of Arizona, or perhaps surfing the Pacific coast of Mexico. One of my favorite movies growing up was called Endless Summer. If there's a movie called Endless Winter, I've never seen it. I'm also not one to force what I love on other people, so here we are. Monochrome winter. Stark white ice racing across the horizon to meet the edge of the great gray-white dome of sky. Stark, dark, sugar coated with snow. At least there is snow. Last year there was hardly any. The year before there was something like 16 feet. This year we had to wait a long time for any snow, but then there were a few storms that dumped enough for the kids to get out and go sledding and build snowmen and do other wintery things. If it sounds like I don't like winter, that's not quite right. I like snow. I like cold even. I like getting out in it. Unfortunately, aside from a couple nights I spent on the lake shore, I wasn't able to get out much this winter. We don't have the clothing or the gear. Nor did we have what I think is the quintessential winter thing to have up here -- a fireplace or wood burning stove. That leaves a kind of monotony of days. Being driven indoors by the cold is hard for people who've lived their lives primarily outside for the last 8 years. Still, I think on the whole we had fun. I would call it a successful experiment. We learned. Would I do it again? Not without more preparation and better winter gear. Even then, I'd probably head for the beaches or the desert long before winter was over.

Work sent me to New York City in January, for an annual meeting. It's something I've avoided in the past, but I was curious to see what New York City is like these days. The picture painted from the outside is quite grim, but if you learn anything from traveling it's that the picture you get from outside a place rarely matches what is happening on the ground. If you really want to know what a place is like, you have to go. I've lived in New York City for brief periods of time at various points in my life, all total less than six months, but enough to get a vague sense of the city and long enough to have had a routine here. You have to carve out a life in the city, find those places that, for you, make it not such a massive and overwhelming place. You have to find those parts that become yours. For me that was the area of Manhattan between Broadway and 7th avenue, from just below Houston to about 18th street. This was where I spent the vast majority of my time in NYC. My girlfriend at the time had an apartment on Minetta, just off 6th avenue. I was working as a photographer and photo retoucher, mostly doing model head shots. It was tedious, boring work, but I could do it anywhere, and in 2001, that felt like a miracle. I'd get done in the evenings and meet her at Tonic, an odd, but wonderful little music club just down from where she worked. It was a strangely idyllic and quiet time and I enjoyed it. The day I left for New York it was -25F at the cabin, -40F with the wind chill. I ended up spending the night before I left in a hotel in Duluth because I wasn't sure our car would start in those temps (it did, but barely, several people were stuck at the hotel because their cars wouldn't start). I'd never seen a plane de-iced before, which as slightly unsettling, but it worked. It was an uneventful flight to New York. I had a few hours a day to myself in the mornings, which I used to wander the city, see what had changed in my old neighborhood. The Waverly diner, where I used to spend an inordinate amount of time, didn't seem to have changed at all, aside from upping the prices on the menu. If you can get a good breakfast, the rest of the day takes care of itself. My old neighborhood felt familiar too, though the restaurants were different, a few businesses had gone, some new ones come in. Encouragingly, two chain stores were gone, replaced by smaller businesses. The third floor window on the far left of the gray building is my former apartment. It was small enough that you could sit on the end of the bed and cook. The apartment building where I lived seemed completely unchanged, right down to the bum pissing on the street at 6:30 in the morning. Just like it was in 2001. Which is not to say nothing has changed. Tonic is long gone, so are many other places we used go, driven out as rent prices in the area went from high to insane. But what has really changed is larger than all that. New York just no longer seems relevant in any meaningful way. Not the way it did in the early 2000s when New York seemed like the place to be. Perhaps it's just not relevant to me. Surely it is still relevant to someone. Surely there are still aspiring musicians and artists flocking to New York. But perhaps not. Who can afford to live in Manhattan anymore? Certainly not starving artists and future stars currently tending bar. There's no Yeah Yeah Yeahs forming in the East Village these days. And out here in the larger world -- it's been a long time since I heard anyone, anywhere outside of New York say anything nice about it. I was half expecting the city to be an apocalyptic wasteland, empty streets, newspapers blowing in the wind, but thankfully it's not that. It feels like a place that has pulled back into itself. The cultural relevancy might be gone, but the city survives. In fact I'd say the city is on the upswing. Or it feels that way when you walk around. I spent most of my time in the financial district, hardly the place you'd go to catch the pulse of the city as it were, in fact, not a place I'd really been before, but that part of the city seems to be thriving. Perhaps that's why the rest of it isn't? The early 2000s heyday of the New York music and art scene that I remember was due in part to the market crash and real estate crash that preceded it. The financial district was a mess, but rent was cheap and creative people flocked to the city. When rents are high like they are today, those that thrive in the liminal spaces of culture go elsewhere. The market thrives, the city does not. Then the market crashes. Rinse and repeat, seemingly forever. I like knowing that New York is still here, still going. For all that's happened since I called New York home -- September 11th, the Covid mess, and more -- the city feels to me like it's survived with at least its spirit in tact. I have no interest in calling it home these days though, I couldn't wait to get back to the woods.

"Nothing will work unless you do." –John Wooden Humans are one of the few large mammals that don't practice for life by playing. Watch wolf puppies, lion cubs, young bears, elk, deer, pretty much any mammal and you'll notice that all they do is play. There's really no teaching either. Parents, and the pack or herd, might put some guard rails on the play, but otherwise the kids are left to their own devices. We, on the other hand, isolate our young, cram an esoteric collection of information in their brains, and later wonder why they can't function in the world. The closest thing we have to this kind of play-as-life-practice is sports. Sports teach the way play teaches: you're on your own, with some guard rails, and a little technique. But the doing? That's on you. The doing is where you get to see kids' character develop. They learn what it feels like to win, to lose, to struggle, to work hard. The kids have been training juijitsu and wrestling for a total of four years, but it's always been broken up by our travels, which isn't the best if you want to get good at something. Constancy allows for repetition to become muscle memory in a way that nothing else does. You have to put in the time to get good at anything. Along with that though, they've never competed, which adds a pressure that makes all the training a bit more real. Competition adds stakes that aren't there otherwise. While Elliott has played plenty of baseball games (and this winter some basketball), the girls had never competed in wrestling until this year. Now they've been in two tournaments and know the pressure of competition and what it's like to lose and how to learn from both. I asked my daughter what she'd learned from competing and at first she said "cross face" because this is what every coach near the mat is always yelling. But then after thinking a moment she said, "a wrestling tournament is where your ego goes to die." Die is hyperbolic, but I was glad to hear that she's grappling with it. It's a tough balance to find. You have to believe in yourself enough to show up, and believe you can win, but also swallow some of that same ego if you don't. There is always someone else out there who has been working harder for longer, and there's no shame in losing to them. Elliott's basketball team won nine games and lost three, which gave him a good taste of both winning and losing. It wasn't enough to get them a trophy, but that's fine because if everyone gets a trophy -- who cares? When everyone get a trophy the trophy means nothing, and there's no point in trying. That's the saddest way to live. Better to lose and learn. Probably my favorite thing about sports isn't winning and losing, it's that the feedback loop of learning is very short. For example, you can't eat a box of donuts and go wrestle without very quickly learning that donuts are not what make you strong and fast. The connection between health and performance in life becomes very obvious when you are training hard in any sport. At the same time you also learn that your body can be changed and trained and strengthened in a surprisingly short amount of time, especially when you're young. One day you can't even pull your chin above the bar, but four weeks later you can crank out a few good pull ups without much struggle. Put in the time, reap the reward. Since I started juijitsu a couple years ago I've discovered that this still applies even if you're not a kid anymore. Show up, do the work, see the results. It all happens a little slower when you're older, but I think you're much more attuned to the way in which juijitsu, or whatever you happen to be doing, applies to all your life. Your problems and struggles on the mat are probably the same as your problems and struggles in life. I've also found that you have to work them out in both places before you move on. Which is where the quote at the top of this page comes in, though I would word it slightly differently: nothing will work, until you do.

The last few years in this area have not been good to ice fishermen. At least that's what I hear. Last year the lake barely froze over. By March it had thawed. This year started more optimistically. Parts of the bay were already frozen by New Year's -- the shallower, calmer water over by Ashland. Here it's deep and the current rips through a narrow pass between our cabin and Long Island. This is the mouth of Chequamegon Bay, which means it's the last place to freeze. Every day since temps dropped below freezing, a steady parade of cars drive past our house down to the boat launch ramp to check on the ice. Day after day they come, cars idling while the occupants stare out at the water, waiting for it to ice over. Every morning when Elliott and I walk the dog we stare out of the lake, wondering what the signs are that tell you when it's going to ice over. Some mornings there is a thin slurry of ice on the surface, but it disappears as the wind and waves pick up during the day. Some days there are piles of ice chunks on the shore, but then the next day they are gone. Then one day we came down to the water and there were big pieces of ice piled up around the shore. The next day there was more of it, like great puzzle pieces slowly fitting into shape. As the puzzle pieces seal up, pressure ridges form, where the forces of wind and the water below are enough to push up great masses of ice, smashing and grinding like tectonic plates in miniature. Even as it got firmer here, I still didn't want to go out on the ice where current runs strong beneath it when there were much safer places farther up the bay. The kids and I drove down to Memorial Park and went for a walk on the ice. It was surreal to stand and walk around where, in the summer, we swim and paddleboard. In a few places you could even see through the ice to the sand and rocks below, like a glass bottom boat. Then one day we got a bit more snow to smooth it over and someone, somewhere, decided it was worth the risk -- suddenly the lake around us filled up with ice fishing huts.