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.

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.

Snow brings a stillness to the world. Life hides away, burrowed under, tucked in. Sound is muted, lost in the hush of falling flakes. Only the soft brush of wind through the pines. I would like to say that Winter's first snow dumped a substantive number of feet, but it did not. It dumped a few inches. Not much, but it is something. An imitation of winter. It may well be that that's all winter is anymore, an imitation of what once was. Things are always changing, not always in the way we want. Only the future knows for sure, but I do feel a certain foreboding of doom for the person I saw driving the car with the bumper sticker "F**k Summer." For the most part, this is why we are here, to experience the winter, which in my family was supposed to be a synonym for snow. Alas Wisconsin winter is also a synonym for gray, sunless, and cold, with or without snow. This is part of why this world needs snow. Snow bathes the world in white, reflecting and multiplying the scant light on gray days. You need the snow to overcome the gray skies. Light or no, the kids have done their best to get out and enjoy what little snow we've had. Snow is also a buffer against the wind and cold for plants and animals. And us. Plenty more pipes freezing without a blanket of snow to insulate the ground from the worst of the cold. The frost here can reach many feet down into the soil by midwinter. More snow on the ground lingers longer in spring, insulating the soil, keeping it warmer longer through march freezes. Without it, it takes longer for seeds to germinate, roots to come to life, sap to thaw. There have been a couple of sunny days. One of them saw flocks of swans swimming by our beach. Further up the bay things get shallower and the water is already covered in ice and snow, but water still flows free in front of our cabin, which brings the bird life to us. Swans, Goldeneyes, Ravens, and Bald Eagles are all frequently around on the lake, along with Chickadees in the woods. The ice on the shore in the photo above lasted a few days, but as of this writing, the lake in front of us remains ice-free. A few days after the first snow it warmed up again and a hard rain washed it all away. Around Christmas it turned cold again and dropped a few more inches of snow, but once again it warmed up and the snow disappeared. As I write this winter is well underway and there is still little more than a light dusting of snow on the ground, about the same amount of snow we got a few years ago in South Carolina. I am still hoping for one good blizzard, but we'll see.

Fall is the slow exhale of the earth. The sun's rays grow ever scarcer as the frosts arrive. Long shadows cut the cold honey sunlight of afternoons that begin to fade at three, turning to a blue-pink twilight over the lake before darkness descends at five. Then four-thirty. Then four. A slow exhale of light. Not long after we returned from California, Corrinne and the kids left to visit her family in Dallas. Jasper and I spent the evenings wandering the lake shore, waiting on the snow. There's a trail that runs the length of the property here, about a quarter mile I'd guess, with a couple of beaches in hidden coves and a picnic table. The first time I walked down here and saw the table I thought of something one of my editor said to me years ago, "you have a nack for finding tables in the middle of nowhere." I suppose I do. I hate working indoors. I hate being indoors. Perhaps I find these tables because I'm always looking for places to be outdoors. My favorite spot is still a huge rock in the middle of the Oconee river where I did most of my writing in college. Not sure I'd have graduated without that rock. These days I write with a laptop, at least for work, so tables are nice (though I do avoid the laptop when possible). Soon it will be far too cold to work out here, but for now it's perfect. I write, the dog wanders the woods. Periodically we both look up and stare out at the lake. It's hard not too, it dominates the skyline like an ocean. Even when you can see a shore opposite, as you can where we are in the Chequamegon Bay, you can still feel something vast about Superior, even in these shallow waters here. In early November at these latitudes dawn happens to be right around the time I get up (roughly 6 AM, though I am fortunate enough to not have to set an alarm, so it varies). I started taking the dog down to the seashore every morning to watch the sunrise. This is when I began to really notice the many moods of Superior. It is a different lake every day. I like stormy days the best. I've always loved storms. It might sound odd, but one of my favorite things is to get caught out in a storm, pitching a tent in a hurry, or taking shelter under a rock overhang, a tree, a large leaf, as the rain pours down, the wind whips, the thunder cracks all around. Everything feels more alive at those moments. I feel more alive. Something about a storm sharpens the edges of perception, hones your body to an awareness that's difficult to achieve otherwise. Everything comes alive in a storm. Get out in one if you can. Or just before one, when the lightning is still a ways off, flashing out there on the horizon, the wind picking up, that preternatural darkness of storm, thunderheads obscuring the light of day. It feels as if the world is just waking up, coming alive, with something urgent to say. The air tingles with that potent mix of electricity and ozone, it smells like infinite possibility, life expanding boundlessly. Storms like that are rare here. That's more out west, or down south. The best storms here are sudden, generated by the lake. They call them lake effect storms. They come on incredibly fast, without any warning. It is both scary and energizing. It is unlike anywhere else I've ever been, any other storms I've been in. And they disappear just as fast. That's the summer though. Winter storms are perhaps something else, I don't know yet. I'm waiting. Walking the lake's edge, waiting. Come on storms. Come on winter. Come on.