Surviving the Cold

Finally it seems as if winter is here, and while I’m a bit bummed about the frigid air outside and the brutally dry air inside, I’m a bit relieved. After all, this summer seemed, well, apocalyptic in its heat, and in the fires that raged all over the state.

Riding can still be had–snow is still lacking–but it’d be a pretty damn cold outing. (Just thinking of this makes my feet twinge with imaginary frostbite.)

This also makes me recall a great poem by Mark Strand. Like many of Strand’s poems, there’s a dreamlike quality that lightens the poem, even though its eventual resting place can be seen as something a bit grim. (After all, what is colder than the eternal, sepulchral bed?)

Lines for Winter
for Ros Krauss

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon’s gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

These lines remind me of the famous dictum of Rilke–“You must change your life”–and yet what Strand argues for is not change, but a determined forging ahead. Perhaps Strand is actually echoing Frost’s line, “I have miles to go before I sleep.” But there is something of Rilke here, I think, in the command of “tell yourself… that you love what you are” even if what you are is fluid, protean, ever-changing.

Strand’s movement is metaphorical in the same way that biking is metaphorical, too–sometimes you just can’t turn back, and the only way out of the woods is forward. The tune your bones play is the exertion of keeping on (to borrow Bob Dylan’s phrase).

And there it is again. The lesson I keep uncovering over and over: endure!

Now for some images of a recent awesome–and cold–ride.

Downtown Denver, from the top of Green Mountain.

My riding buddy Ed, after climbing to the top.