There is a well known story about George Herman Ruth, aka the Babe, the Bambino, the Sultan of Swat and any number of more obscure but equally colorful nicknames, regarding his salary demands back in the early 1930s, when the NY Yankee slugger was at the peak of his powers on the baseball diamond.  The story goes that Ruth was holding out for an $80K salary for each of the next two years, just when the country was plunging into the Great Depression and that was a godawful amount of money.  The reporter is said to have commented that this happened to be more money than was earned at the time by the President of the United States, to which the Babe replied “What the hell has Hoover got to do with this?  Anyway, I had a better year than he did.”

It may be like apples and oranges, but the fact is the country’s economy was in free fall, while Ruth’s stats for the ’31 season happened to be stellar:  a .373 batting average with 46 home runs and 163 runs-batted-in, phenomenal numbers of a kind G.H. had been putting up since 1926.  George Herman Ruth arrived as kind of a ballplayer from another planet in many ways and changed the entire nature of the game;  there are reams of sportswriting you can peruse if you must know the details, but the point here is that if anybody had a right to demand an enormous salary at the time, he was that guy.  He also happened to be one of the most famous Americans of his day, his name familiar around the world.  He got his contract, by the way.

What is germane here is that when Babe Ruth says he “had a better year” than Herbert Hoover, in his case he’s not talking generally about how things had gone with his life in general over the previous twelve months or anything like that (though the word is that his life was rather “colorful” off the field), but specifically he means the baseball season, as sanctioned by league officials, which runs for about six months from April through September.  Okay so you know this already, and you no doubt also know that every baseball season, every sports season for that matter, always ends with a recap of some kind, whereby one takes a look at the numbers, or statistics, as well as acknowledging the highlights, hence the modern “highlight reel” of moments never to be forgotten, and of course, above all, the winners and losers.  Some also might try to determine if the past season has been qualitatively special or different or significant, as sports fans have limitless energy for coming up with ways to obsess about their favorite pastime.

Besides sports, there are any number of other seasons, holiday seasons and wedding seasons and concert seasons, the various “silly seasons” and the Season of the Witch, and of course that grand summation of all manner of seasons in Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 which Pete Seeger made into a song, which the Byrds made into a megahit and one assumes Pete didn’t mind a bit.  So the big news here is that the time has come to do a recap of the past season that just closed in beantown and many other places, that most basic of seasons known as winter, as in summer/fall/winter/spring, and any proper Boomer with the right cultural background might also recall Princess Summerfall Winterspring from the Howdy Doody Show.  But how many of them also know about the actress Judy Tyler, who played that character and later had a role beside Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock, after which she died in a car crash in Wyoming?  When she was but 24 years old?  Somewhere near Laramie, evidently.  Her role on the show was played by a marionette after that.

It should be noted from the beginning that unlike recapping a sports season  –   a period of time and events about which all the fans are intensely aware, and who share the memory of things like highlights and statistics and winners and losers etc.  –  this one will be somewhat arbitrary and local and personal.  If you were paying attention, your winter season just closed, as well, and perhaps this recap will inspire you to do your own recap, as it never hurts to stop and reflect about things sometimes, don’t you think?  Sports fans understand this in their bones.  Of course, if you’re one of those people who is all about just blindly forging ahead all the time, never looking back, what follows might be of limited interest or none at all, and if that’s the case with you, you just go ahead and forge on!  And good luck with your startup or Ponzi scheme or whatever!  And consider what you might be missing.  Whereas sports season recaps tend to start with a rundown of the winners and losers, any proper season seasonal recap should rightly start with something far more elemental, which is of course the weather.

If there is one aspect of living all humans share, besides death and taxes, it’s the weather, which is also a much better conversation starter than those other two.  Of the infinite number of things in life that beg for our attention, weather is among the most paradoxical.  Its role in life ranges from the mundane to the tragic and profound.  Weather can make or break a picnic or a ballgame, and it can also change lives forever, sometimes in an instant.  Weather can kill, not just on an individual level but in great numbers and at the limit it can wipe out entire species, and has been doing so since species began.  Never forget that the Wizard of Oz began with a weather event.  

One of the most important and obscure novels ever written was Storm, by George Stewart, in which the main protagonist is the weather itself, as suggested by the title, unlike all that other fiction written with “storm” in the title somewhere, which tend to be exclusively human stories, surprise surprise.  Storm was a bestseller back in the ‘40s, but that was then and a lot of bestsellers have washed over the dam since then.  George’s book may not be highbrow literature and doesn’t deal with vital personal or social issues of the day, but merely tells a straightforward story about a major disruptive weather event in the Pacific, and how it affects any number of peoples’ lives over the course of a week.  It sums up weather in all the ways that weather is profound and consequential and mundane that in the end is quite unique and special.  It tells the story of one storm, while acknowledging that such storms come and go and have always done so.  

A similar but quite different weather story is The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger, about a local New England real life weather event, the so-called “No-Name Storm” that happened at Halloween in 1991.  It’s partly a very human and tragic fishing story but also gives the weather a major role, and the bonus is that the film version presents a more dramatic “weather story” than the book, in some ways.

For all its ominous aspects, the warming of the planet has enabled what was once a bland and somewhat ritualistic form of communication –  “So how’s the weather?”  –  to now pack a lot more punch and fraught meaning.   Homo sapiens and great numbers of other species are on the move in what is becoming the greatest migration in modern history, with draught and extreme weather events having huge consequences that get more extreme by the day.  Chances are you’ve an inkling of some of this right where you happen to be, as climate change, like the pandemic, unites us as “one world” in ways few of us could have expected.  One reason this writer left California, forever, back in the ‘60s, is that the weather was so boring, with no distinctive seasons and too many hot cloudless days and too too much dryness.  That picture has changed profoundly recently, such is the power of a warming climate, as fire and flood of Biblical proportions are now part of the California Dream.  The stats and the highlight reel for the winter season in the Golden State must be impressive, indeed, making the beantown recap mundane in comparison, but that makes the latter no less instructive or meaningful, as we shall see.

Before launching into the story of the past season, the stats and the highlights and what it all felt like and what it all might mean, we need to set down a few parameters, so to speak.  You probably have at least a vague sense that the winter “season” runs from late December to late March, at least in the northern hemisphere.   More specifically it begins at the moment of the the winter solstice and ends at the moment of the spring equinox, but just what the hell is that about?  Quite specifically, winter started in Boston at 4:47pm on 12/21/22 and ended at 5:24 pm on Monday March 20th a few weeks ago.  One supposes the baseball season starts at a given moment, on the first pitch of the first game, and ends with the last out of the last game, but in that case how much does specificity really matter?  Does one count the first pitch of spring training or of the regular season?  Depends on who you are, probably, and it is a fact that some keep track of beginnings and endings more than others.  But with something like winter, it’s got everything to do with the sun overhead and what lies directly beneath its path across the face of the earth.  Could it get any more specific, or easy to measure?

So easy!  And it explains what those Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn are about, aside from being the titles of controversial novels by Henry Miller, which you’ve no doubt never read.  On that moment back in December, the sun was directly over a point 23.5º south of the Equator, at noon, which happened to be the T of Capricorn.  It had been slowly creeping south towards this point for many months, and incredibly, following that moment, it turned around and started moving north again, ever so imperceptibly.  It was the moment of the solstice.  And on that recent moment on March 20th it lay directly over the Equator, at noon, passing by on its way back north, the moment of the equinox.  This is all a repeat of the same explanation that appears elsewhere on this blog site, but this writer assumes you never read that or at least don’t recall it, so now you have it again, and isn’t it worth knowing?  And isn’t that chart ever so helpful?

What is also germane to the recap, here, is that our little Sunday get-together biker “club,” The Outlaws, happened to do a ride on both the last Sunday of last fall, 12/18/22, and the last Sunday of this past winter, 3/19/23.  So would you believe the weather on both days was nearly the same, 40º and blustery?  Or that we followed the same route on both days, from Needham MA down to a warm restaurant in Medfield, about nine miles south?  Or that on the more recent Sunday it was even a few degrees colder but the overall experience was just a tad warmer?  How could this be? one might ask.  As the crudely drawn but highly instructive chart strives to show, the sun sits just a bit higher in the sky twelve weeks after the winter solstice.  If you want a specific measure of this, take a look at the lower left corner of the weather station readout, whereby the UV measure around 10am was already at #6, “high”, and would go a few points higher by mid-day.  Of course looking at a number is one thing, but better yet you should spend some time outside, feeling the effects of that wonderful March sun on your naked face, or any exposed skin.  If you’re willing to go down in the weeds on this, you might also note that back on Groundhog Day it had elevated itself by a quarter since the solstice, something which Phil and countless unnamed groundhogs everywhere already know, no doubt.  In their case, all the “skin” was exposed, in a manner of speaking.

Let’s get to some stats concerning the weather of this past local winter, unspectacular for the most part but still significant, as the planet ever warms.  Temperatures in Boston followed current worldwide trends:  overall they were warmer, getting with the global program.  Check out the chart for January with its elevated roller coaster of temps BUT OMIGOD WHAT’S THAT AFTER GROUNDHOG DAY?!  Call it a global warming anomaly or “extreme” outlier or whatever but the fact is we’re looking at record lows for early February, a wandering polar vortex that lasted all of two days, and moved on.  Part of the New! Improved! jet stream that nowadays some weather professionals describe as “loopy” which verges on poetry wouldn’t you say?  The chart for the rest of February shows us more “unseasonal” warmth with a return to more or less historically “normal” temps for the rest of March to remind beantowners that it takes spring warmth forever to arrive, which it hasn’t yet, in fact.

Which gets us to snow, and a “warming” phenomenon of which cross country “Nordic” skiers like ourselves have been experimentally aware  – which is to say frustrated disappointed and demoralized  – for about a decade now.  Over that time frame good local skiing has all but disappeared, requiring that a memorable experience requires a car trip that gets longer and longer.  And as responsible urban homeowner/snow shovelers who take pride in their work, epic snow removal efforts of the past are becoming legends of ancient history, and would you believe that this past winter there was not a single serious snow-shoveling event, at all, in the city of Boston for the first time, ever? Yeah the season total says twelve inches but it came is such dribs and drabs, an inch or two at a time, that other than being kind of pretty in a vaguely wintery way for a day or so, it was inconsequential.  This is creepy, my friends.  Is it worth mentioning that in 2022 we got 54 inches, and in 2015 (not that long ago) the total was 108 inches, the all-time record?  Climate chaos, for sure.

It is also a fact that we purchased brand new ski packages last fall, the “waxless” type that we had eschewed for 40 years but which are much less of a hassle on the “new normal” of snowy days in the ‘30s, and would you believe we had not used them, at all, come March?  For the fact is, nowadays even a long drive to NH or VT could end in bitter fruitlessness for the snow-seeker, as warm fronts quickly follow cold ones in the “new normal.”  Which brings us to Massachusetts topography and its new, crucial role in these matters.  Take a look, there, at a lovely topo map for these parts.  You’ve got the green lowlands of the eastern and coastal sections, and that dark green stripe towards the west that is the Connecticut R valley, and the darker brown to the west shows the Berkshire Hills that morph into the Taconic Mountains of eastern NY state.  Mt Greylock, at 3500 feet, sits way up there in the corner, and is the highest point in MA.  

Just west of Boston you get that light brown area that comprises the Worcester Plateau.  This is one of the more rural and beautiful parts of the state, with lots of great birding and biking (but only if you’re in good shape and love a workout) and many faded mill towns that tend to look forlorn.  It is not a notable tourist-vacation-second home destination like the Berkshires, and many Bostonians who know all about Cape Cod and Lenox and Stockbridge get quizzical when you mention towns like Athol or Petersham or Ashby (where we have friends) or especially Baldwinville which is part of Templeton which is where we finally went skiing.  

Which is all about topography, and the past season’s precipitation.  Though beantown was snowless, we did got a lot of rain, sometimes several inches at a time.  “Warmer and wetter” follows the climate change predictions for the Northeast we’ve been hearing for awhile now, though last year winter wetness was followed by months of drought. With climate chaos, every year is a crapshoot at least for now.  On the other hand, hasn’t the uncertainty of the weather always been one of life’s little teasers, saboteur of the best laid plans, like with every picnic since Adam and Eve snacked in the Garden?  One assumes it was a sunny day, but were there ants?

And the way it goes in winter in the new normal, when Boston gets rain those in Berkshire and Worcester and Fitchburg (two cities on the edge of the W plateau) often get snow, and we considered ski trips to city parks in such places, such was our desperation.  By early March, rainy days in Boston only yielded small amounts of snow in those plateau cities.  But what we realized at some point is that whereas those cities lie at about 500 feet above sea level, traveling a few miles west meant another climb to about 1000 feet, and our friends in Ashby lamented at how they’d been looking at snowfalls of a foot or more, a white presence that had never quite gone away for weeks.  Whodathunk another 500 feet would make such a difference?  Thus a day of Boston rain on a Friday in early March led us to make a desperation run to Baldwinville and Lake Dennison, which got a half a foot of white stuff, to put those new skis on some snow and enjoy “winter” if only for one day.  The images tell the story and it was all pretty fine.  Yes, it was a highlight of the season. 

So has it become, so to speak, a whole new ballgame?  Must we always think of Clint Eastwood’s advice when planning any outdoor activities, or whether to move away from our lovely homes on the ocean or in tinder dry forests?  As in “Do I feel lucky?  Well, do ya, punk?” In our case we seized the weather moment, so to speak, and it worked out, and it was a highlight.  Which leads us to the rest of the highlight reel and the realization that a recap of highlights of an astronomical season, like this past winter, tends to be an intensely personal matter.  The fact is, you’ve been observing and probably puzzling over at least a few of the pictures floating alongside all this wordiness.  They are, in fact, the highlight reel, which has several themes that bear explaining.

For one thing it was a good season for art, both outdoor and indoor, starting with ice sculptures back around New Year’s, followed by a display at the Charlestown Navy Yard and the unveiling of The Embrace, the Martin Luther King sculpture on the Boston Common.  There were good shows by local folks at the Fitchburg Art Museum, a venue where most beantown art lovers never go, but then they probably don’t have friends in nearby Ashby, whom they can meet there.

This year’s Jamaica Pond winter highlight was the presence of around 100 hooded mergansers in the first months, who were replaced by around 50 common mergs for the past six weeks.  As spring has approached, they’ve been trickling away to the north with only a few left as the season shifted.

In his annual Birthday Address this writer prognosticated he might finally see the screech owl in the Arnold Arboretum that had eluded him for years and would you believe that a week after that, in late February, the bird showed up?  Most remarkable!

That same arboretum also offered up some new winter-flowering species he’d never noticed before, a red witch hazel and Chimonanthus praecox, aka wintersweet or Japanese allspice, an Asian plant which of course is what the AA is all about, for the most part.

In the same vein, he received a birthday card that presented some great photo opportunities, which made it a kind of highlight of the season, though if you sent a card less visually spectacular, he thanks you for your thoughts, which as we all know are what really count.  If you sent no card or had no thoughts whatsoever about his birthday, that’s okay too!  Chances are he didn’t think about yours either.  

We finish with images of 75 Federal Street in downtown Boston, which happens to be a block down from the writer’s dentist, which he chanced upon whiled wandering around after a cleaning.  Totally serendipitous and totally mundane as a highlight, no doubt,  he was drawn by the bronze plaques on the outside, which he’d never noticed over 15 years of going to the dentist.  This can happen in a city packed with skyscrapers, whose details can easily slip by unnoticed, unless one is truly looking.  The plaques are by Paul Fjelde in the Art Deco style, who was hired by Thomas James, the architect, back around 1930 when the whole thing went up, in the same era when the Babe was on a tear for season after season.  The interior is equally spectacular, all polished brass and marble and take a look at all those fossils!  The Babe was a winner and so is this building, wouldn’t you say?

Which gets us to winners and losers and the question of whether outside of sports and politics (and sometimes even then), such things are ever straightforward or even measurable.  In the early 1930s Babe Ruth and the Art Deco style of architecture had their day, while untold millions of people faced the hardest of times.  When it comes to recapping something like an astronomical season, the numbers only tell us so much and even then does winning and losing even apply?  Was that ten-below-zero day in February a winner? (it set a record!) or a loser? (ask the person working on the utility lines that day).  

Winter is a beautiful season in its way with its own charms but it is also a fact that around here when spring finally hits  –  our crocuses magically appeared on March 21st –  we all start to feel like winners in some special way that seems to happen every year about this time, co-incidental with the start of the baseball season, and what’s with that? 

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