Winter does not become us. We of the North become winter—in our whitened faces, and buttoned up visages, and in our calculations of who deserves to be rewarded.
Garrison Keillor, who hails from the austere Lutheran fastness of northern Minnesota, has made a career as a humorist suggesting that we of the north believe that winter suffering makes us better people. Of course, there is a long history of fable and proverb to support this notion of our superiority. Northerners are the ants, we have been told, storing up food for the coming hard times, not the carefree southern grasshoppers that live in the moment.
What a difference a year can make for this fable.
Last March, temperatures across Maine edged up toward 70 degrees, at least in southern Maine and were consistently in the 50s and 60s for most of the rest of us. That was when there was a big northerly bulge in the jet stream, which pushed warmer air much further into higher latitudes in the eastern two-thirds of the country creating an eerie sense of the world off-kilter. We could have been grasshoppers and played our violins all summer and fall instead of storing up cord after cord of firewood like ants. Some of us even ordered less firewood.
This year there is a similar bulge in the jet stream, only it is pushing warm air into the western two-thirds of the country, leaving us at the cold end of the loop. Most of us could go for some of that off-kilter sun right about now. But here we are: down to the last few sticks of firewood in the cellar and bracing for the fifth blizzard of the season, which will usher in the first ghastly day of spring snow shoveling. Not enough of the ant ended up in our basement for this spectacular winter, but at least the oil dealers are happy.
We can, however, watch the myth of northern moral superiority reenacting itself currently on the larger world stage. Just this week in Europe, the Germans and Dutch, apparently exhausted by the economic fecklessness of their southern neighbors in the European Union, created a significant financial panic around the globe by declaring that Cypriot islanders in the Mediterranean were even more underserving of a bailout than the equally feckless and sun-loving Greeks, Spanish and Italians. All of these southern people need to have some more winter put into their souls, and the good German and Dutch burgers are here to supply it.
Perhaps it helps to learn that this winter morality tale has been with us for a long time, dating back over 2,500 years to the storyteller, Aesop, whom, ironically, Greek philosophers, including Aristotle, made famous. Maybe the Greeks now need more Aristotle and less Zorba.
But the point is that every child has heard of the ant that saves up its food during the warm months, while the grasshopper, usually depicted playing a violin, fiddles away the summer in song and dance and faces starvation come winter. Starve, wastrel!
Biblical verses seem to have absorbed some of this earlier Greek morality. The Old Testament Book of Proverbs features this admonition: “Go to the ant, you sluggard! Consider her ways and be wise, which having no captain, overseer or ruler, provides her supplies in the summer, and gathers her food in the harvest.” Pretty stern stuff, that.
Even though Aristotle noted his accomplishments, others have questioned whether Aesop was, in fact, Aesop and not merely a fable himself. Aesop left no actual book of his stories, at least that scholars have been able to locate, but the rich oral tradition of storytelling preserved his fables in Greece for at least 500 or 600 years when they were first recorded in a book that has survived.
The collection of his fables appears in Aesop Romance, usually dated to the 1st or 2nd century AD, along with a shocking description of his appearance as “of loathsome aspect… potbellied, misshapen of head, snub-nosed, swarthy, dwarfish, bandy-legged, short-armed, squint-eyed, liver-lipped—a portentous monstrosity.”
And you thought internet slurs were bad. Good stories, however, are immortal, even if storytellers are monstrous.
After reminding us of how we ought to spend our summer, another of Aesop’s stories gives us a ray of hope for the future on this particular year’s first day of spring in Maine.
In Aesop’s fable of the north wind and the sun, these two implacable forces of nature challenge each other to a contest of strength to see which of them can make a traveler remove his coat. The north wind tries to blow the traveler’s coat off, but the harder he blows the tighter the man wraps his coat around him. Then the sun comes out from behind a cloud and slowly warms up the countryside and enables the traveler to remove his coat. Persuasion over force.
All of us morally superior northerners could do with a little more persuasion and a lot less force right about now. Here comes the sun?