I know I am not alone in feeling that the past winter was a tough one in northern Arizona. Though it didn’t feature the epic snowpack amounts of 2023, it amounted to a good snow year—over 100 inches total in Flagstaff—and simply to a long haul of cold days, so that it wasn’t until well into April that we crested over 60 degrees. In March and into early April storms rolled in with the regularity of weekend tourist crowds, with varied combinations of rain and snow and sleet and graupel. For anyone confined to Flagstaff, it was simply a long slog.
Where I grew up, in the upper Midwest, winters could be like that too, and for those of us who were not the sort of people to jet off to Florida or the Bahamas the primary quality that winter called forth was sheer perseverance, a sort of stoic confidence that even if we lived in flyover country we had a quality of quiet toughness that those living in milder climates surely lacked. For every generation, it is a joke to summarize to younger kin how challenging life once was—and though no, I did not have to slog miles through snowdrifts to get to school, I did have to walk to the bus stop on frigid mornings, micro-glaciers of snot frozen on the dismally gross balaclava that was the only thing between me and facial frostbite.
I think of those freeze-your-whatevers days some mornings in Flagstaff, though mainly with the privileged stance of someone who’s in a much more comfortable place now. That’s because the exceptional topographic diversity Arizona offers can readily provide feelings of profound seasonal opportunity—and confusion. Whatever the season where you are, it is likely not a terribly long trip to another one. Since the year began I have had occasion to travel south a number of times, for work or pleasure, and each time my body ends up seriously confused about what season it is. In late January I met up with a couple of friends in Phoenix and we drove down to camp in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, hard by the Sonoran border. The nights were cold but the afternoon sun was warm; countless green shoots inched upward through the stony ground, hummingbirds buzzed, and it was impossible to suppress a sweet bodily sensation that said, it’s spring already—don’t you want to stay?
Like many feelings of seduction, that can be a dangerous one. When I was first discovering Arizona I was entirely undone by that winter warmth, and before too long I found myself living in Tucson, in a small studio apartment whose temperature was regulated by windows and a swamp cooler. The winters were grand; the summers, not so much. The lures of place, it turns out, are not that different than the lures of partners I have been with, or wanted to be with: if you get too hung up on a single potent quality, you’re likely to be disappointed in others that are likely more important.
In February, after the winter’s biggest snowstorm had left, I had reason to drive through Oak Creek Canyon a few times, and on those trips my seasonal dysphoria reached something of a climax. Down in Uptown Sedona the air smelled of rosemary, and the tourists wore shorts—at least some of them. In the lower part of the canyon the creek flowed strong past leafless trees: was it spring, or still winter? Hard to say—but not a few miles upstream, where snow still lingered along the roadsides, while the south-facing slopes above were dry. But once I’d climbed the switchbacks up onto the plateau there was no doubt: it was still deep winter among the ponderosas, with a healthy snowpack lingering even in the sunny spots, and the dashboard sensor warning me that ice was likely on the roadway.
It is a great good fortune to live amidst this diversity, but for me it instills a midwestern-bred self-doubt, a distrust of decadence, that says something like You ought to commit yourself to one climate, not try to experience them all on the same day. Even though I like living in Flagstaff I find myself easily caught up in the moment, thinking of how if I were to commit myself to the desert climate I could be outdoors comfortably virtually all winter long; or if I were to hedge my bets just a little with the Verde Valley I could surround myself with the pleasures of spring in February, and probably never have to shovel snow again. Two months ago that seemed a tantalizing prospect, far more so than the knowledge that up on the plateau there were many more cold days to get through, icy sidewalks to navigate.
But. Finding some maturity in life eventually means making commitments—to a place, to a partner, to a family perhaps, to a particular pathway chosen out of the myriad available. It means saying no as well as yes. And so every time these past few months as I’ve driven up from Phoenix or Sedona I’ve known that I am trading in the siren lure of soft air and floral scents for something colder, and harsher.
At least for a while. Because I know that if I am willing to consign myself to the long cold, to months on end without t-shirt weather, there is a payoff sometime. Maybe April, maybe May. June? At some point the days will be soft, and the wind will sough softly, not gusting, in the pines, and I will know not only by how I feel but also by the demeanor of my neighbors when I see them on the streets or on their porches that the payoff season has come to the mountains.
Photo caption: Aah, springtime, somewhere.
