Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Shelter

I've been back from my Santa Fe adventure for some time now, but never finished recounting it. So it continues...

S. and I had some MCS negotiating to do to figure out the best way to screen her footage. The hard drives that stored it gave off a mysterious smell that made her sick. So S. didn’t want them in her living room and as a precaution, I only wanted them in my room with the windows open and fans on. So we set up outside, squinting into the sun, with the desert dust blowing across the computer. I’d been told there are tarantulas here, outside, like grasshoppers at home, but menacing instead of musical. Fortunately, the early November days were unseasonably warm.

MCS sends you outside whenever you can, because it’s a guarantee of circulating air, a relief from whatever poisons lurk inside. When your goal is to be outside as much as humanly possible, you develop a new relationship with the weather-- among other things, a new and boundless gratitude for a warm, sunny day.

When outside is only a place to pass through on the way to other inside places, you are not really aware of the weather. Superficially, of course you are – you bring an umbrella when it’s raining or a scarf when it’s cold, but this awareness has the snapshot, one-dimensional quality of a weather report: sunny, cloudy, chance of rain. Bundling up and walking fast gets you through the coldest city streets, but if you sit and try to work outside on a day towards the end of fall, you experience all the nuances: winds that herald winter, breezes in from the south or blustery gusts blown in from the moors of 19th century novels.

On the East coast, the coolness of the evening settles in gradually, so you can sit outside well after dark before the chill comes. But in the desert, the moment the sun goes down the temperature plummets twenty degrees. Suddenly, outside is impossible and you’ve got to run in, slam the door and wrap up in a blanket.

When I know I have an inside to go to, I love the cold. I love the winter that reappears each nightfall, the way the grey branches vanish into the deepening sky and how the windows rattle as darkness blows in. I approach shelter with excitement, like an Eskimo arriving home at his igloo, or a desert nomad reaching his respite from sandstorms. What an extraordinary achievement, the building of shelters.

1 comment:

Mary said...

more, more, write us more!

i've just caught up on your SW travels and feel such empathy. Just today I got slammed by so many fragrances and God knows what else that I am having trouble breathing tonight. I think i need to resort to nebulized glutathyon (sp). So far, it does not seem to help my lungs. what's an mcs-er to do in this stinky ole world?

anyway, thanks for your awesoem blog, please keep at it!