If I had to pick a favorite season, it would be Winter. I’ve described this feeling a couple of times already, but I feel like I’m still discovering just why my heart pulls me this way. Lately, I’ve started to appreciate that my love for Winter is rooted in contrast — it’s the differentness of the season that draws me toward it. So in many ways, my love of Winter is tied to my love of Spring and Fall. They sit inside a positive feedback loop — a good Fall leads to a better Winter, which leads to an even better Spring. It’s why I love living in the mountains where I get to see the seasons change. It’s why I love California, where you can visit any season you want with a few hours driving. And it’s why I anchor this newsletter to the seasons, no matter how late it comes. And this one is quite late.
Over the past few years I’ve felt myself putting more and more pressure on Spring. Feeling frustrated when we get a late snowstorm, impatient when the trails are slow to melt out. This is weird — Spring always comes, perhaps a little early or a little late, but it always comes. And why would I feel nervous about a season? The other day, I was reading one of my favorite newsletters and it hit me:
The preciousness of summer is one of many reasons that the wildfire smoke, which sinks into the Missoula Valley and struggles to leave, feels so threatening — and so deeply, deeply sad.
We have lost Summer. It has been lost to extreme heat, fire, smoke, drought, and floods. It is no longer a time of long carefree days spent outside going wherever our heart takes us. It’s a time of evacuation plans and carefully calculated outdoor excursions — of air quality monitors, extreme weather warnings, fire briefings, and smoke forecasts. It isn’t something we are at risk of losing should we cross some arbitrary 1.5˚C or 2.0˚C global warming threshold — it is something already lost today as a result of past decisions.
This feeling was hammered into me a few weeks ago as we were eating lunch just off Echo Summit. In June, it’s Pacific Crest Trail thru-hiker season in Tahoe, and they all descend through Echo Summit to resupply in town. The PCT is a 2,650 mile long backpacking route that stretches from Mexico to Canada, and it generally takes about 5 months to complete. It’s something I used to want to do some day. But talking to these thru-hikers, the challenge is different now. You need to start late enough that the deep snow has melted in the high country, early enough to avoid dying of heat exposure, and move fast enough to finish before wildfires close the trail. Most of these events now happen within the span of a month. What used to be an adventure defined by perseverance and personal endurance has become a game of chess with our changed climate.
It’s this loss of Summer that has fueled my anxiety for Spring to deliver. Will the snow melt before the fires start? How many weeks of mountain biking will I get in before it’s unhealthy to be outside? Spring has become the outdoors season, and Summer has become the HEPA filter season.
Last year, we lost Spring too. That one hurt.
Thankfully, this year Spring came on differently. Search and Rescue teams were back to normal operations, our public lands were open, indoor restrictions were loosening, and we had not one — but three freely available COVID-19 vaccines available.
It’d be silly of me to say that anything else defined this Spring more than getting vaccinated. I’m still in awe of the effectiveness of these vaccines and how fast we were able to create them. The entirety of the vaccine rollout has been a testament to how effective the government can be at materially improving people’s lives when it makes that goal.
Did you ever wanted to know what Kyle’s ideal version of politics is? That’s it. Government materially improving people’s lives with our shared resources. It’s not as crazy as it sounds.
![Camp Tacos] (https://buttondown-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com/images/49554027-4869-411a-b72f-53436a595f83.jpeg)
Jess & I took advantage of our new found ability not to land in the ICU with COVID-19 and headed out on some road trips. Our first trip was out to one of my favorite places — Moab, Utah for Jason’s 40th birthday.
I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for Moab’s landscape, but to be honest the best part of the trip was seeing old friends without the arbiter of death hanging over our heads. That’s kind of been at the heart of why I’m so appreciative of these vaccines. Not just the not dying part, but not worrying about dying part.
That’s why even though we’ve been legally allowed to eat in restaurants most of the pandemic, we haven’t. I would have felt like a huge dick if I ended up in the ICU because I wanted to eat inside where I know the virus transmits easily.
But now, things are different (Editor’s Note: well, they were when I started writing this newsletter before the Delta variant had become dominant in California). That’s how the whole vaccine thing works out. We get vaccinated, we get to do previously deadly stuff because it’s no longer deadly. This is all great news because as it turns out, I love restaurants. I had kind of forgotten this. It was a bit of a bummer to stop going to bars & restaurants last Spring, but it wasn’t that big of a deal either. We like to cook most nights, so we just kind of shifted our life more in that direction. In May, we ate inside at one of our favorite local restaurants for the first time in more than a year, and it felt a bit euphoric in a way I hadn’t fully expected.
It’s felt great to get back out into the world and get a mix of past-times (hotels in San Francisco) and new things (restaurants in Palm Springs). The silver lining of losing the Spring of 2020 has been a new appreciation for the things we used to take for granted.
It’s been a slow year getting out to the ranch. We had some crazy wind events this Winter, and it resulted in hundreds of downed trees throughout the forest roads that separate the highway from the property. Most years, we’re waiting for the snow to clear to start our summer excursions. This year, we were waiting for the forest service to clear the road. It’s usually no problem to clear the few trees that fall every year by ourselves, but this year it was a very different story.
Some of these trees were up to five feet in diameter, measuring their age in centuries. In other words: beyond my sawyering comfort level. I was able to count over 150 rings on this particular behemoth, with at least another 100 left. That means this tree was a sapling about the time of the declaration of independence!
While the air’s been clear, I’ve also been spending more time mountain biking. I finally got myself a nice bike (Santa Cruz Nomad) this year, and I’ve been slowly getting more comfortable sliding down our rocky trails. It definitely doesn’t hurt that I can reach some beautiful trails (see above) less than a mile from my front door.
Then again, that’s kind of why we live here.
This Spring more than any other felt like a defining moment of now. Mourning for the loss of Summer, euphoria of returning to old activities long forgotten, and savoring of whatever the present moment offers up for today. I remember so much of my early childhood focused on previous generations asking me what my plan was. What college would I go to? What job would I have when I graduated? How many children would I have? Where would I travel before I joined the real world?
I was never able to answer those questions honestly and directly. Partially because I was a child, but also because my view of the world was very different than theirs. I grew up in a world defined by change. The idea that the world would remain in a steady state for decades to come was so outside of my frame of reference that I couldn’t even process it. I still can’t. What job will I have? You mean for the rest of my life? I don’t even believe professions have the capability of lasting a lifetime any longer.
The most valuable skills of today are ones of adaption. You have to be able to change your plans to fit the circumstances the world offers. Older generations believe you have to fight the world to fit your plan in order to succeed, but I would argue that kind of mindset is a curse today. I watch so many older people suffer at the hands of this stubbornness — this refusal to change jobs, refusal to move, refusal to change anything that they’ve been doing for their whole life — and not understand that it is this very stubbornness that is sabotaging their happiness. It’s baffling, sad, and mostly makes me anxious. We have so much more change ahead, and even more needed change if we want to thrive as a species.
A few years ago, I started a document that I revisit every few weeks tracking where I wanted my attention to be. At the top I have this:
To get better at change. To do difficult things. Build. Learn. Invest. Explore.
The more true I live my life to this motto, the more satisfied I feel. I’d like to believe I did a good job of doing that this Spring! I’ve enjoyed the fresh mountain air. I’ve pushed myself into uncomfortable spaces. I’ve rolled with the punches, lost some opportunities, and taken advantage of new ones that show up.
COVID-19 has put a lot of pressure on all of us to change and adapt. Almost everyone I know has had to change some critical piece of how their life works over the past year, and none of us have come through the other side completely who we were before. I know a lot of people still feel resentment, a mourning for how things used to be. But just as Summer in the West will never be what it once was, neither will our lives be what they were before this pandemic.
PS: I’m now Kyle Aster now!
When Jess & I got married, we decided to choose a new last name to share as a way to symbolize the commitment to each other and the new life we’re building together. We ended up choosing Aster. It’s a small purple wildflower that grows all over the Sierras in the summer.
The paperwork’s taken a while, but we’ve finally got new Social Security cards in our new name about a month ago and I guess I’m officially Kyle Aster. Don’t worry, I’ll still be keeping the @kneath handle in most places to keep y’all confused. It only feels natural.