Black Ice

A form of “seasonal affective disorder,” I’ve been told such winter depressions are called: a vitamin D deficiency caused by lack of sunshine, maybe, or a rise in melatonin during the shortened daylight hours. Possibly a lack of serotonin. No one knows for sure. But the cure, they say, involves getting outside a little whenever the winter days are bright. Set up an indoor lightbox, buy a bedroom air ionizer, and it’ll go away soon enough. Soon enough, they say.

There’s a lake in the hills north of my house—a small reservoir held in place by the steep red-cliff walls of the canyon that wraps around it. And the snow is always pretty there, when it first falls: a soft fluff, drifting gently down. The snow always seems to offer an uplift of spirit, however difficult it makes the drive back home. But then, over the next day or two, the wind does its work. The afternoon sun casts the long shadows of the cliff-top trees across the ice. And, swept clear of the sparkling snow, the actual surface of the lake can be known for what it is.

There in the shadows, a hard darkness locks the water down for the winter, and to see that black ice is to realize just how far down the sunless cold goes. That’s the trouble with the usual explanations and purported cures that people offer for the despondency of winter. They just don’t see the depth of the darkness. They seem to think that pretty snow is the norm, and black ice an aberration.

But to those who have the experience, melancholy doesn’t feel biochemical. It feels metaphysical—a sadness in the world. To call it “seasonal affective disorder” is already to miss the truth of it. The sadness doesn’t come to the mind as a disorder of perceptual affect. It comes as a fault in reality itself: a dimming of things in themselves. Unwarmed by any sunset light, as James Greenleaf Whittier wrote, The gray day darkened into night.

That poem, “Snow-Bound,” was once as famous as a piece of American literature could be, although I have the sense it’s not much read anymore. And perhaps for good reason. With his opening images of the days after a heavy storm in rural New England, Whittier paints a picture of fantastical shapes of snow and ice that decorate what is in truth a graveyard landscape. Winter is death, both a sign and a cause of mortality. And the lure of death in the icy purity of the season is held at bay only by the stories read aloud to one another by the snowbound family, in their iron determination not to succumb to the deadliness of the season.

Whittier’s “Snow-Bound” is hardly the only poem to describe winter this way. Look, for example, at Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” another poem as famous as an American work can be. And, unlike Whittier’s poem, it’s still widely read, I think—albeit often misread as something sweet and cheery. For Frost, the snowy woods are mesmerizing, there at the darkest evening of the year, and only the need to keep his promises prevents the poet from embracing the cold sleep for which he yearns.

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is a suicide poem, in other words. Or, at least, a poem about the lure of the grave, so lovely, dark, and deep, in winter. And what explanation of medicine and biochemistry would answer Frost? What would convince him that the world is actually fine and “affective disorder” is only in his head?

Work especially hard through Thanksgiving, to compensate for the coming days of inactivity. Travel to the warmer south, if the money can be found to manage it. Read stacks of easy genre fiction, just to fill the day—these are things we have learned to do, who live in winter’s country. And all that, combined with a will not to abandon responsibilities, usually carries us through to the promised spring.

But the black ice beneath the snow remains the truth of winter—honest cold, without the pretense that it’s only a matter of affect. And the dark disorder we discern: It is the cold world’s fault, not just the mind’s.