Polar vortex, Alberta clipper, when the wind pushes hard out of the January northwest you can picture, without checking, blue pixels spilling into the midcontinent weather map.

It’s sat here for days. Makes my forehead hurt on my noon walkabout. Bites my fingers through my gloves. Even the pavement, now dusted saline white in the perverse absence of snow, seems crystalline harder. Whatever moisture may have been, now sucked into the hungry sink of dry air, is left as sharp crystals somewhere else. “Water is life” is the rally cry of the righteous protesters. Here is its absence for a time, hard frozen and out of reach. 

I’ve always described myself as a cold weather phenotype, thinking I was being clever. And I love the purity of winter air, breathing in spare and dust-like flakes that instantly disappear in my sinuses as if they were nothing to begin with. But this same trail during summer smells of water vapor, of verdant life, breathed out by a biodiversity of understory plants and soil microbes or carried in on a southwestern wind or loosely held by dark clouds overhead. Sometimes it’s the pregnant smell of algae and aquatic verve, blooming and blowing in off Mendota.

None of that now. It’s a different world.

The mud trail is now hard as any stone. Land locked tight as a drum, despite distance from Robert Service’s remote Yukon, a bit of it blew down on the unstable gyre. Ominous record warmth in Alaska, crazy winds assaulting Ireland, fires in LA. A crisis anomaly sits right here, this blue spot on a world turned red.

I approach a gray squirrel who allows me to get even closer than normal for habituated campus squirrels, and when it finally bolts, I see why. 

There on the edge of the trail, it is as perfect as the imprint a bagel might make in a wet cement sidewalk. A walnut frozen into the mud at the center of a perfectly circular scraping of a squirrel as it tried to scratch it free. God knows how long this squirrel has been working it. Squirrel claws are rather fine and hook-like, enabling them to be among the few mammals that can climb effortlessly headfirst down a tree trunk. I wonder what scratching at the abrasive mixture of fine mud locked in hard ice does to that essential machinery. 

I kicked the walnut free with the toe of my boot and then stood off at 20 yards or so to watch for the squirrel to return, thinking it would likely retrieve the walnut and retreat to the safety of the big trees. But I was already cold, and I had important work to appear to be doing so I didn’t last long.

This is the dilemma of the herbivore in winter – the urgency of needing calories when the calories are most scarce. Seeking energy when winter vegetation is dry, dormant, and rank. Evolutionary theory says the squirrel is making an energetic calculation, trading off exposure to wind and predators and the energy expended and the wear on those precious claws for the promise of precious energy intake to offset body heat lost to the cold.

Evolution would say that it’s a forward-looking strategy, an unconscious calculation for the optimal probability of leaving offspring. The squirrel knows only hunger and urgency. 

That sounds heroic but it’s not. It’s not some courageous strategy on the part of a tough little animal in the face of dire odds. It’s not a homily or an example (or maybe I’ve no stomach for it). It just is – given the circumstances. It’s what’s left. 

I’ve studied the mortality of animals for decades. For herbivores, life is squeezed (or drained) out of you with talons or fangs, or surrendered to seasonal starvation in the cold, or lost as disease breaks down vital systems. And I have always wondered about their pain. 

We imagine that their fur somehow makes them cozy where we’re not and that death comes quickly, and I think that’s magical thinking on our part – implemented to make ourselves feel better. I think they feel the cold, the pain of broken teeth and bones, of deep hunger. Pain is, after all, the important physiological signal that something is a threat. Life history adaptations to persist at the margins are not magic. They’re the boundary where pain and discomfort are endured so mortality is fought to a draw. 

I kicked the walnut free almost absent-mindedly, admiring the struggle through my anthropomorphic lenses. Further up the trail, a similar pattern around a frozen acorn. This one at the edge of a lawn and even more exposed to avian predators and, not coincidentally, about 50 yards from where I watched a red-tailed hawk capture and kill a squirrel last fall. Its talons clenched and puncturing vital organs; it stood in the dry leaves until the squirrel went mostly limp. The hawk then began pulling the squirrel apart with its hooked beak. You always notice the jelly-like movement of the freshly dead, when the tissues are still warm and pliable, but the creaturely ghost is gone. 

There’s no moralizing or judgement. The hawk is meeting its own energetic imperative, its own burden for its future offspring, using its own evolutionary tools. Squirrels and hawks have enacted this drama for millennia. And I think there’s a beauty in the sweeping, reeling, and sometime randomly grotesque cycling of it all. It’s where I run when God is distant.

Malice, greed, grievance, cruelty, and willful ignorance are the human stain. It sets our species apart. Indeed, we celebrate it. 

How cold and dark it got this week. In the face of humanity’s greatest urgency, we killed off our nascent and feeble climate leadership, gleefully strangling progress in its infancy. The greedhead predators are poised to “drill baby drill,” given extra license to exploit and pollute “where black is the color where none is the number“.

I struggle with how to think. Am I already dead? My life to be picked apart in aftermath? Fatalism is a damnable trap. But so is the airy-fairy hope of empire. Magical thinking says we’ll avoid the consequences. 2024 was the warmest year on record. Annual global mean temperatures exceeded the Paris Agreement threshold of 1.5 C over baseline for the first time. Carbon emissions accelerated. The wise people I know say to fight for every increment. And the fight just got substantially harder.

God provides pain, effort, risk, and fear on the road to bare decency. How quaint. Better to take it all and let the suckers and losers deal with the aftermath. Make America great. 

My kids. My students. The grand ancient pageant of life. It’s what’s left and I am the squirrel. Scratching at the frozen mud. 

Squirrel photo by Yannick Menard on Unsplash
Footprint photo by Paul Green on Unsplash