Winter’s Heavy Mantle and the Quiet Joy of January
We’ve plunged deep into the heart of winter now, the kind where the cold feels personal. I’m writing this on the night before New Year’s Eve, with temperatures wedged firmly in the single digits and a wind coming off Lake Superior that seems to have developed a genuine dislike for people. The last couple of weeks have been busy— Christmas split between Motley and Minneapolis, and a couple of stubbornly cold dives. Winter, at this point, feels less like a season and more like a weight you carry around in your shoulders.
Christmas itself is complicated. I enjoy it sincerely for a day or two — the lights, the food, the small moments — but the rest of the season is a study in low-grade stress. Not because I’m doing most of the planning — Shari is — but because she does nearly all of it, and she does it thoroughly. When she gets stressed, I absorb it like a sponge with anxiety issues. There’s travel to coordinate, meals to plan, gifts to organize, and a constant hum of logistics running in the background. The girls love it, which helps, and most people seem to thrive on the whole affair. I mostly aim to make it through intact and emerge on the other side slightly tired but still married.
One of our holiday outings was to Bentleyville Tour of Lights in Duluth — known as one of America’s largest free walk-through holiday light displays, with over five million twinkling bulbs illuminating Bayfront Festival Park each winter. Originally a backyard spectacle in Esko back in 2003, the attraction has grown into a regional phenomenon that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors from near and far each season, complete with complimentary hot cocoa, cookies, marshmallows to toast at fire pits, and even visits with Santa.
Bundled beyond recognition at Bentleyville, where holiday cheer glows brightly and a wind off Lake Superior determined to extinguish all joy. Still worth it.
We picked a Friday night to go, which, in theory, sounds about as appealing as a January tax seminar. In reality it was perfect. The temperatures hovered just above zero with a wind off the lake that could chill the marrow in your teeth, and as a result the crowds had thinned from what one enthusiast described as “Disney World with lights” to roughly twenty-five people. We ambled through the illuminated paths in under twenty minutes, laughing at the cold and enjoying the rare experience of almost having the place to ourselves — a quiet, frostbitten luxury.
Holiday diving has been sporadic at best; the lake and air have been collaborating with single-digit temperatures and 20–30 mph winds, which is a polite way of saying the conditions have been ridiculous. I even bailed on a planned dive yesterday, having no interest in becoming a frozen historical artifact. Instead, I turned my attention to a drysuit mystery after my last outing left my left arm soaked. My usual diagnostic method involves plugging the neck and wrists, inflating the suit with air like a piñata, and spraying it down with soapy water while waiting for telltale bubbles. This time, nothing. Knowing the leak had to be in the wrist or glove, I switched tactics and filled just the arm of the suit with water, then watched the outside for betrayal. It didn’t take long before a tiny cut in the dry glove gave itself away. A small victory, but in winter diving, I’ll take them.
At first glance: festive garage piñata. In reality: a highly technical, extremely expensive onesie whose job is to keep me from freezing to death.
Heather and I also managed a solid winter dive on the Madeira, where I shot additional footage for a longer winter diving and mental health film I’ve been slowly assembling, currently titled Into the Cold. That project will stay under wraps for a while yet, but I did put together a short, lighter piece from the day — clips of us hauling dive gear to and from the water in winter sleds, generally goofing around and some underwater footage of the wreck. I shared that small video with the dive club, and it felt good to offer a glimpse of the quieter, sillier side of winter diving before disappearing back beneath the surface.
Tomorrow we are hosting a modest New Year’s Eve gathering — soup, fire, cocktails, and maybe twenty souls scattered about the house and yard. It should be fun in that comfortably chaotic way that family and old friends tend to be. And yet, if I’m honest, I find myself already longing for mid-January and its predictable routine. I’m told this is what happens when one gets older: holiday events, once a source of mirth and excitement, morph quietly into obligations to tolerate rather than occasions to relish. Maybe it’s my hearing — or the creeping weariness of constant social negotiation — but I find I’m less inclined toward the hubbub than I used to be. Still, there’s something restorative about hunkering down around a backyard fire pit in the cold and letting the flames do the entertaining.
Happy New Year.