It was Wednesday evening, so I trundled the trash cans out to the curb, and for the first time in more than a year thought, “Brrrr. It’s cold!” Well, not really cold. I had taught for 2 years at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, located, for those of you unfamiliar with that state, about 110 miles north of Madison and 2 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Come winter - which could arrive in early September - you plugged your car into a block heater to keep the oil from freezing, for crying out loud! So, not that kind of cold, but different enough from what we had been having to qualify as “cold.”
And considering the geographical variable is important. More than a few of my friends have viewed our move from North Carolina to the suburbs of Chicago with disbelief. “Chicago? You’ll freeze to death!” One replies with art, theater, restaurants - which unfortunately Covid has somewhat curtailed. But let’s stick to weather for the nonce. We are not taking jobs in Chicago - we are retiring. Snow and ice and cold are certainly problematic if you must for some reason leave the fireside. However, if, on the other hand, you are a kind of climatic tourist, toasting your tootsies in front of the fire as the wind and snow goes wurthering around the house, the word that comes to mind is “cozy.”
So I scurried back inside, nursing the flicker of “cozy,” gave Vido, the large and very cozy black lab stretched out on the living room floor a quick rub - he thumped his tail approvingly - and settled back onto the couch. Maybe it was that quick little unexpected “burr” that drew my attention to an article - National Geographic? Curiosity Stream? Not sure which, but the general theme was how various critters were dealing with the approach of winter. And as is often the case with my iPad browsing I began to skip around.
First, I perused a video about the black bear population on Vancouver Island - there are quite a lot of them. And the amount of salmon they consume in preparation for their winter hibernation. The phrase “mass quantities” springs to mind from somewhere. Beldar? Perhaps? The same can be said of the nuts and berries stashed away by all manner of furry critters; squirrels, mice, rabbits, moles and voles, which themselves became entrées for the pre-hibernation feasts of bigger critters. There was even an article about how bears regulate their insulin to maintain slumber throughout winter. Which got me thinking, why not? If bears do it, bees do it, squirrels up there in the trees do it, why shouldn’t we do it? Let’s do it - let’s hibernate! OK. Getting a little punchy. But really, with CRISPR, and tech barons flirting with cryogenically induced immortality, would some version of human hibernation be such a big deal?
Now, in the name of full disclosure, I must admit that sleeping ranks up there among my favorite activities - along with dozing, napping, dreaming, etc. So advocating human hibernation fits right in there with one of my wife’s favorite mantras: “anything worth doing is worth overdoing.” But hibernation is not as simple as it might seem at first blush. There are some concerns. First, a number of “hibernators” actually give birth while hibernating. Being male, this would not be an issue for me, but considering my other nocturnal visits to the BR, there is cause for concern. This concern remains despite knowing that bears themselves do take some “hibernation walk-abouts” during the winter. Second, housing. Caves seem fine for furry critters and bats, ponds for amphibious hibernators, eaves for our feathered friends; but I fear we have moved beyond the archaic shared hearths of our progenitors. We seem to have grown overly dependent upon beds that move and shift, warm and cool us, driven by data gleaned from our smartphones, intelligent watches, and brain-reading ear buds. Whoa! I am quickly talking myself out of human hibernation. Maybe, I need to turn away from AI hibernation and pay more attention to “the inner world” of hibernation.
There the attraction remains. When my daughters were young, they were both charter members of BSA (bad sleepers anonymous) and needed help drifting off to sleep. So I would often read to them. However on occasion they - particularly the younger - would request “a story out of your head, Daddy!” And so Mouse Tales was born. Mouse Tales came to be what I called “adventures in lullaby.” I would tell stories of Papa Mouse, Mama Mouse, Sister Mouse and Brother Mouse who seemed to always be seeking shelter at night as a winter storm was blowing in. They would scamper up a pine tree, discover a "cosy" abandoned woodpecker hole, filled with warm, soft pine needles. They would snuggle down into the pine needles, and listen to the wind as the tree swayed gently back and forth and back and forth and back and forth . . . with me repeating the “back and forth” refrain gradually more slowly and quietly until I was able to slide out of the room without one of them popping up to inquire “Then what happened, Daddy?” You get the idea.
I have retained significant aspects of this ritual as I seek to ease myself to sleep. Those of you who are curious about the solitary nature of this ritual have apparently not moved through another of life’s common evolutionary stages: “The Who is Snoring Ritual.” This along with the “God, It’s Freezing in Here Ritual ” partner to the “God I’m Sweating to Death Ritual” or the “l Can’t Sleep Without White Noise Ritual” all of which go a long way to explaining why couples in affluent cultures have separate bedrooms. So bear with me as I share my “could be the seed of human hibernation ritual.”
I target 10 pm as the starting point. I toddle downstairs to my studio cum gallery cum bedroom, a nice finished lower floor, which does unfortunately lack a bathroom, but is acoustically isolated from the rest of the house. Hey, you have to make some trade-offs! At 10:00 I fire up the iPad, turn on Curiosity Stream, and choose my video. Tonight I am engrossed in a series of Secret Society episodes - The Masons and Knights Templar. That takes about an hour. Sometimes, I’ll opt for a double-feature, but that will run me right up to midnight and endangers my reading hour.
My reading hour is usually dedicated to serialized fiction - mysteries most often. The reading hour also triggers audio elements. Again, iPad centered which allows me to blend classical music with NatureScapes Holographic Audio - rain, wind, water, cicadas, storms, whatever, that forms the background for my reading. OK, so we are now coming up on midnight which is meditation time. And here I do another bit of blending- a Reiki meditation session often backed by a folk music channel from, oh, early 1960s, to maybe mid-70s. That takes me off toward the tiny hours and I drift off to sleep. Unless, god forbid, somewhere along the line I stumble across an idea that I want to share with you. Then I fire up Evernote and start to write. If I can hold myself to just sketching the main ideas, 2 AM is a reasonable target. But, if I really get into it, just beating sunrise is a more likely goal.
So, really not hibernation at all. More like aestivation - a state of being awake, active. And how terribly, terribly strange is that: throwing myself into a state of aestivation in the pursuit of human hibernation. I am doing something very wrong. Oh? What? Just a shade after midnight. Time to meditate. Maybe Eva Cassidy Songbird, or Live at Blues Alley. I’ll let you know. Night, night.
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