February 2
We’re obsessed with weather. It’s a topic of conversation and a constant component in every form of news reporting. We change what we wear because of the weather. In some places we outfit our cars for it. If we go by sea, the weather is our central concern. After all, it can kill us.
Most of all, weather inspires our rites and rituals; our celebrations and our entreaties. Give us a good harvest, a mild winter, the right amount of rain, just enough sun, not too much wind. Nearly everybody wants to know, not what the weather is right now, but what it’s going to be. Because we structure our lives around the weather.
We don’t do that quite as much now as we once did, when so many more of us depended directly on the weather for crops, for healthy herds, or for good hunting or fishing. But the echoes of our olden selves are still here, even if we mostly see the weather through windows and its biggest effect on our lives — we hope — is more money spent on heating or cooling.
Today is Groundhog Day, or at least it has been since 1887. That’s the day that a groundhog is ritually consulted in order to divine whether warmer spring weather will come to North America early or later in the year. It doesn’t really vary by much, of course, and statistically speaking, the groundhog doesn’t really have anything to do with it. But statistical thinking? Come on. That’s not the stuff we spin good stories out of. It’s never behind giving our groundhogs names like Punxsatawney Phil (that’s the groundhog in Punxsatawney, Pennsylvania, where Groundhog Day started) or Milltown Mel (he’s the one from Milltown, New Jersey), Essex Ed (Turtle Back Zoo), Staten Island Chuck (New York), or Woodstock Willie (Woodstock, Illinois). There are more. A lot more. And given that there have been well over 100 Groundhog Days and the average life expectancy of a groundhog is at best about 14 years, each of these names tends to be given to a succession of marmots.
That’s what a groundhog is, by the way; a marmot. They’re also called chucks (note a couple of those names above), woodchuck, whistlepig, moonack, weenusk, land beaver, and some other terms. But technically they’re marmots, from the family Sciuridae in the Rodentia order. They’re solitary creatures, and unlike other marmots, they don’t live in the mountains. They’re pretty smart. If an extensive burrow needs to be dug, they’ll cooperate. If one senses danger, they whistle to warn everybody else. And even though they mostly live alone, they have complicated networks of friends and relations. In fact Rabbit, from the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, was really more like a groundhog in having so many Friends and Relations.
But Groundhog Day isn’t really about groundhogs. Not actual, real groundhogs. They’re probably smart enough to understand that if they see their shadow on February 2 it doesn’t have anything to do with winter or spring. The captive and relatively tame ones who participate in Groundhog Day ceremonies take it calmly in stride, probably expecting (and getting) some extra treats in exchange for the bother. All except the groundhog that helps celebrate the day in Quarryville, Pennsylvania. That one is stuffed.
Just to refresh your memory, by the way, the traditional Groundhog Day ritual states that if the groundhog sees their shadow on February 2 (that is, the sun is out), it’s back into the burrow to wait for another six weeks of winter. If not, and it’s a cloudy day, spring is due to arrive early that year. Now, this doesn’t have to do with the astronomical arrival of one season or another; you can’t change those. It has to do with the weather; whether it’s going to warm up any time before about mid-March.
it’s my contention that even though the groundhog thing isn’t anything to rely on, peoples’ obsession with weather reaches something of a peak right about now in early February. It’s the middle of winter — at least that’s the way it feels, whether it’s the mathematical center or not. And for those of us living in places where winter is cold are starting to get pretty tired of it right about now. So we can’t help ourselves; our attention has turned to the weather.
One thing about spring in the United States, for even a little bit longer than Groundhog Day has existed, is baseball. Now there’s a sport at the mercy of weather. It’s never played in the winter, and if there’s rain, the game is called off and the field might even be covered by tarps to protect it. So you might think that all the important decisions about baseball tend to be made in the summer, right? Nope. It’s been February 2, the day that has weather magnetism for our attention. It was February 2, 1876 — eleven years before Groundhog Day! — that the National League of professional baseball was formed. And 24 years later, in 1900, it was another February 2 when they came up with the American League.
Dublin, Ireland has a reputation for wet, rainy weather, and you’ll see a lot of references to weather on June 16, 1904 if you read Ulysses by James Joyce. It was a cloudy day, we’re told, but pretty warm — Leopold Bloom, the main character, has to take his hat off and wipe the sweat off his forehead more than once. Even fictional characters are affected by the weather — maybe that’s because Ulysses was published on February 2, 1922.
That was a doubly notable day for James Joyce, and not because of the weather. His masterpiece (at least up to that point) was published on his birthday! He was born on February 2, 1882. Maybe he mentioned Dublin weather in Ulysses because he believed that “In the particular is contained the universal.” The Dublin weather stands in for all the world’s weather, just as Leopold Bloom’s experiences in one single day stand in for all of his days, and for that matter all of ours, too.
But really some experiences are pretty unique. One of them happened on February 2, 1814. That was the day the last frost fair was held on the River Thames in England. Frost fairs were carnivals, temporary settlements, and open markets held on the ice when the River Thames froze solid. In our warmer times, that no longer happens. But in 1683, for example, not only did the river freeze for two months, there was ocean ice up to two miles off the coast of England. Go ahead, deny the world is warming. In Galileo’s time the church denied that the earth moved around the sun. They had the authority to proclaim whatever they wanted, but Galileo replied “and yet it moves.” And King Canute, sometime around 1027, stood on the beach and commanded the incoming tide to halt. He got his feet wet. (To be fair, Canute was probably making a point that you shouldn’t listen to everything kings say because the tide was not going to obey the words of a king.)
Sometimes, though, we can adapt to weather and make something great out of it. It was February 2, 1925 that the Great Serum Run to Nome, Alaska took place. It was an epic effort by dogsleds to transport the diphtheria antidote to Nome to save the people there. About 150 sled dogs and 20 mushers travelled in relays over 670 miles in 5 days. If you remember Balto, the sled dog depicted in Night without End by Alistair MacLean, and in Balto: The Dog Who Saved Nome, and in Balto, the animated movie (not to mention the sequels Balto II and Balto III), he was the lead sled dog on the final leg into Nome. The February weather in northern Alaska a century ago was, to put it mildly, pretty extreme. That epic journey was the inspiration for the Iditarod dog sled race, a pretty good result of coping with weather. Up to a point, anyway. It’s getting to the point that it may not be cold enough to have enough snow and ice for the race. It always comes down to the weather.
