Become the Dark
It took me 25 years to acclimatize to Duluth, and the big hurdle was these long winter nights. Here’s how I did it.
One day I thought, as long as I’m hopelessly depressed and dysfunctional, maybe I should dig a crawlspace under my all-time low and sort of, you know, make it cozy in there?
Step one: Uncouple your mood from the weather, to the greatest extent possible.
This took me two decades to get the hang of, but it can be done. Duluth is going to give you some ass weather. Conversely, when Duluth is nice, it’s God’s country. But if you let Duluth’s ass weather get to you, you’re effed. It’s a bad place to be sensitive to gray days and one of the coldest, longest winters anywhere in the country, the world even. Duluth in February — when winter is more than half over! — may be compared to the ice moons of Jupiter. And then you might get a chilly summer. So, welcome to town, buckle up, get ahold of yourself, and appreciate the city for what it is besides the weather.
We’re so far north, the path of the sun weaves dramatically across the sky as the seasons progress. You can feel the wobble of the globe. Don’t let it dizzy you or give you motion sickness as the sun stays out a different number of minutes per day. We can have extreme and long winters, and short summers of varying quality. It’s not personal.
Step two: Dark days strategies.
To deal with months of dark days, I have used two distinct strategies over time.
Dark Day Strategy #1: Chase the light.
My first several years here, I spent every summer 100% at the beach (the origin of Lake Superior Aquaman), and I hated fall because it’s just the death of summer, and I spent winters with all the lights on in the house, cursing the dark. Soon I switched to full-spectrum bulbs. I love full-spectrum bulbs, they are like little suns. They work, like how a vitamin D supplement can make you feel like you just got a tan, but on the inside. For me, full spectrum bulbs and/or vitamin D can get my pituitary gland or whatever talking to my theta waves again. You know what I mean. But these interventions are expenses and extra tasks; I tired of keeping myself in fresh bulbs year after year. For a while, I prioritized having just one full-spectrum bulb in a place I spent the most time. But my need pinched off. Keeping all the lights on in winter started to feel desperate and sad, like the Northern Exposure episode (season 5, ep. 17 “Una Volta in L’Inverno”) where Walt gets addicted to his full-spectrum light visor and needs an intervention to remove it. After a few years of normal bulbs I had more or less adjusted. I had even forgotten about my vitamin D and let it expire. Was I still depressed? Yes.
Dark Day Strategy #2: Become the dark.
This is a more advanced technique. But I use it exclusively now. I experimented with embracing the fact that night falls in the mid-afternoon. Because if you chase the light, it hurts to lose it. But if you don’t care — see step one, above — it doesn’t hurt anymore. That’s when you can make friends with Earth’s shadow, and your own.
Here’s what I did: installed rope lights and Christmas lights in the house, to only give indirect light, i.e. around the base of the walls, behind stuff. Then, I leave all the other lights off. I use overhead lights or lamps for specific tasks like reading or making food. But otherwise I quit worrying and learned to love months of long nights. In the lowest light possible, I am calm, slo-mo. Listen to a lot of Mazzy Star and the like.
Watch Ad Astra and get in the zone. It’s Apocalypse Now in space, and the liminal montage of Brad Pitt’s months-long solo voyage to Neptune is reminiscent of winter in Duluth. It’s an inner journey and you need to be strong.
Now my lizard brain engages in a way that feels at home in deep time and doesn’t worry about anything less than a geological timescale. Every now and then I’ll go to bed at 8 p.m. if I feel like it, and get some serious dreaming done. You have my permission to go to bed early in the dead of winter. Humans would hibernate if they didn’t have to work.
After year one of my Become the Dark plan, I actually became unsettled when the days started getting longer again. Around March I was recoiling like a vampire from the light. That’s when I knew I had switched polarity. I used to love the light returning. Now it is almost an irritant. Summer is still my favorite season. But I look forward to deep winter in a way I couldn’t imagine just a few years ago.
An index of Jim Richardson’s essays may be found here.