Sasquatch-Friendly Weather

I never leave October without tools to combat the Gray Doom that is fall and winter in the maritime Northwest. Sure, there is a lot to love here from November through March: knitwear, vitamin-A packed orange vegetables, uncrowded beaches, the arts, the holidays, and dress-up cocktail parties. Bright objects—red raincoats, traffic cones, fall leaves, the Pike Place Market sign—stand out all the more brilliantly against the gray sky.

But that heavy gray sky is with us almost constantly for five months, and it’s easy to lose perspective living under its vague, unrelenting dullness. Its presence is undeniable, documented. In a study covering 51 years, Sea-Tac airport was cloudy on average 266 days a year. The same study showed that from November through March, Sea-Tac was cloudy 77% of the time, on average 23 days a month. While ours is a dream climate for conifers, mushrooms, Sasquatch, and vampires, it can turn can turn the nicest, otherwise sunny human into a lumbering, carb-craving, depressed bear. The dark days are so emotionally challenging, in fact, that the University of Washington offers not only world-class academic programs. It also offers light therapy.

Light therapy is one way to combat winter blues, clinically known as Seasonal Affective Disorder (S.A.D.). For a student diagnosed with S.A.D., the U flips the switch on a simulated sunlight panel and the student soaks up all the fake rays needed to recover. I feel for the unsuspecting university freshman, probably from Arizona or Southern California, who gets clobbered by our cement-colored clouds and has no idea what hit him. (Or her. S.A.D. affects more women than men.)



Favorite rain boots. Photo courtesy CDStuder Photography. Used by permission.



It’s no surprise that so many of us, at one time or another, get some version of the winter blues. Only a full-on cock-eyed optimist, or the rare person unaffected by any weather, is immune to the pull of the Gray Doom. Of course, there are people who love the darkness. They thrive on the quiet and the lack of distractions. They are sure-footed spelunkers finding treasures in this cave—poems and songs, time to reflect, and time to concentrate on work.

I’m the other kind, the more common sort who needs evidence of light at the end of the seasonal tunnel, who needs to manufacture the sun when I can’t see it. My winter blues prevention and recovery kit includes a Happy Lite simulated sunlight panel, vitamin D tablets, the best rain boots I can afford and two rain coats in revved-up colors.

More importantly, a wise person told me last year how to best fight the winter blues. He said, simply:

Go outside at dawn and walk.

The last thing I want to do in this weather is haul my bum outside. Yet as much as it doesn’t make sense, it works. Last year I walked three days a week at dawn with a friend. While some walks were leisurely, others included steep stairs and additional exercises such as crunches, push-ups, and modified pull-ups. We caved in to the pouring rain only once.

Last “winter” was particularly long, and for various reasons it could have been very difficult for me personally. Strange as it sounds, it was easier to keep a positive attitude by moving toward and into the darkness.

I'm starting to view this Sasquatch-friendly weather as not such a bad thing. I now see it as a training ground for handling one of life’s big, and counterintuitive, challenges: face your fears to dispel them. If going out my front door to face the overwhelming winter gray keeps me from falling into its clutches, then maybe moving toward my fears will dispel them. I’m ready to face November through March—and more. And if I'm lucky, I'll see Sasquatch on one of my early morning walks.