There are outdoorsy folk, but those folk are wrong. We invented shelters to be sheltered in and I feel like it is deeply morally wrong and fucked up that some people do not have them (true), and further that if you have one, voluntarily leaving it is a step back, evolutionarily speaking (questionable, fine).

Ask me my religion and I will tell you “indoorsy.” My brother and I were raised that way, besides Catholic. We grew up early-days in New York, in the Bronx mostly, which back in the day had winters you’d best describe as “sure, ok.” Some snow, not too cold, look here’s a picture of us trying to build a snowperson but it’s not a very good one, what were we thinking being outside like this, let’s go back inside.

Occasionally you’d get the big fuck-off snowstorm that had us scrambling around going “gee whilikers! I hate being outside!” (me) or “wow I’m kind of dumb so I’m going to stay out here!” (my brother). But mostly it was just kind of weather-ish and unremarkable and anyway, I was watching a lot of cartoons.

Pennsylvania, thirteen through seventeen, was significantly colder, significantly more snow, significantly more bears, and my understanding of winter was “no,” as I had grown more sophisticated in my thinking. Back to NYC for college and a lot of indoors studying but better yet, to San Francisco for grad school and a lot of indoors writing. California has the right kind of winter, which is “none,” by which I mean “yes, fine, I guess we can have dinner on the patio but then I’m going back inside.”

Why did I move to Utah? Well, I know why I moved to Utah, and that is a long and tedious subject which is framed by the topic sentence, “Here is another mistake I made because I was running away,” so we won’t get into that right now. Utah winters are most clearly understood as “ugh,” which is a combination of pretty cold, and fairly snowy, and there are no sidewalks and you have to drive everywhere, with the end result being scary and bad. So I stayed inside only extra, which was facilitated by the fact that my job was the freelance kind and my office uniform was the no-pants kind and my life was kind of the best, until it wasn’t so I moved to Wisconsin.

This is another of the moves that my essay
about mistakes will cover. It was a significantly more mistakey mistake for a
number of reasons, some of which include the fact that I had to wear more pants
and also that the winter was more scary and bad only worse so.

Here is a story: Once, in Wisconsin, I
tried to brake on a hill in a snowstorm but instead I slid down it and the car
in front of me started sliding too and then we slid past each other, each of us
gently rotating in opposite directions but toward the same unrestricted intersection.

If I and the person in the other car had taken
a moment to wave cheerfully at one another other as we spun in slow motion
through each other’s orbits and to our certain simultaneous dooms it might’ve
been a better story, but I was screaming and maybe they were also, but I didn’t
check because I am a poor multitasker and was selfishly wetting my pants at the
time instead.

First I cried and then I went home and cried more and swore at winter a lot. So I moved to Minnesota next, to be with the lady who is now my lady-wife and that was a good move, in that way. However, the weather was decidedly the worst yet, and thus my decision-making capabilities remain firmly in question. Minnesota has enormous plows and subzero temperatures.

My wife grew up in Minnesota, and has a story about how she got frostbite in both of her thumbs. We feel a similar way about winter (“no”) and our vows included a pledge to live in a volcano or similar for 8 months of the year.

We kind of picked Vancouver, BC by looking
at a map and asking ourselves, “what place in Canada doesn’t have winter,”
and then moving there. We were wrong, though – it is winter now, and our heat
is on, and up, and the dogs are all under the blankets with me, and I’m looking
at the wet sidewalks outside, and the folk walking by with umbrellas, and
thinking about how quickly you can go from thinking 20F is fucking freezing to
finding 40F fucking unbearably cold but luckily you can still stay indoors at
any temperature.

Vancouver winters are rainy rather than
snowy, and it is a fact that rain makes everything grim and gloomy unless it is
rain on a fresh green meadow at dawn in some bucolic place in a Forester novel,
none of which adjectives belong to Vancouver proper. People from Vancouver say,
“the rain is terrible! Wouldn’t you prefer snow?” and we say
“no! no we certainly do not thank you very much and good day!” and
then we go back inside.

Being near-exclusively indoors folk it doesn’t technically matter whether it is rain or snow but from a purely morale-based perspective rain is infinitely preferred, we’ve discovered, maybe just because we’ve been hurt so badly by snow before, and the temperatures required to make it, and the salt required to ensure you don’t fall on your ass in it, and the way it accumulates and grows dirty and remains crowded into corners mocking the idea of the sun, and laughing at warmth and snickering at your hat, which doesn’t match your gloves and your thumbs are frostbitten anyway so why are you bothering?

There are a lot of outdoorsy folk in Vancouver, probably because mountains surround the city and they are the landscape feature most beloved by the athletic, an informal imaginary poll in my head tells me. All those people polled are still wrong, as are the ones who go outside. This is the least bad winter I’ve ever had to briefly be outside in, which is a whole other essay, topic: “Sometimes she learns before she is dead,” and that is the fairytale ending I always hoped for.