I wish I could talk to my dad about the winter we didn’t have this year.
Or the summer that arrived in March.
Or trees and lawns so out of sync with each other they look like they’re from different biomes.
It would be fascinating to get his take.
Where I live — where he lived his whole working life, Colorado — March is supposed to be a little bitchy.
March’s age-old job in our parts is to resist spring-iness as long as it can. It’s our snowiest month. Our wildest. The worst snowstorm I can recall was as I drove back to college after spring break in the ‘70s. I almost spent a semester in a median on I-25.
As they say to newcomers, get used to it.
But I’ll never get used to the temperatures here just before the advent of spring: in the 90s. Record-breaking heat. Now the standard March harshness has been bypassed by an explosion of blossoms — trees that had no choice but to start budding in January.
It was the tail end of warmest winter on record, and not just here. Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas.
Add what meteorologists called “severe, historic dryness” — a record deficient snowpack here that caused ski resorts to open late and close early.
Ah, but from his sensory-deprived confines in the White House, the canned tan man who knows everything posted on TRUTH Social that an extended January cold snap in the Northeast showed “environmental insurrectionists” are wrong about a warming planet.
Tell that to Phoenix – 104 degrees in March. Tell that to multiple sites in the West with highs in the 90s before winter could recede.
“This is what climate change looks like in real time: extremes pushing beyond the bounds we once thought possible,” said University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver.
The extremes are about more than temperatures.
The combination of drought, heat, and what March tends to do where I live — blow its top — caused backyard calamity at some Northern Colorado residences.
March winds can be harsh, but they were “Auntie Em!” stuff one night — sustained gusts up to 90 mph.
Frighteningly, alarming numbers of mature, moisture-starved spruces along the Front Range were blown over, their root systems bared as if yanked by a merciless dentist.
Many of us had been watering our trees during the winter to account for snow that never fell. The result now, entering April with the unexpected heat and too little precipitation, is green-ringed trees dressed up for spring amid winter-brown lawns cussing the calendar.
“Foliage? What the f–?”
This brings me back to my dad.
He’s been gone for several winters, which in a few instances would have been fine by him. As a native of warmer climes, one who liked to hit the tennis ball, mow the lawn and till the soil on his suburban half-acre, he would grump when Colorado frigidity would drag out.
I’d like to tell him that this year, instead of celebrating spring’s arrival, many of us are mourning it, or at least shaking our heads over its coming so early.
Knowing how the plant world works, he’d admit to the same. He’d talk about growing things’ need for dormancy, even those evergreens that seem to do nothing winter-long but be green.
He’d remark on the ominous fact that mosquitoes are out so soon.
He’d have been news-hawking all this time, reading the papers about the dangerous weirdness of our climate in times when experts refer to the “extreme of the extremes.”
Sadly, “extreme” refers to rightward, anti-science politicians in power.
The president says if hotter temperatures are a problem they are no problem at all — better for golfers, better for colonization of the Arctic.
My dad, though he anxiously awaited the end of each winter, would say a long winter’s wait was his plight in this place of snow-capped peaks and trout streams, because that was how nature worked.
Of leaders, he’d say anyone who would look lightly on what we’ve done to the Earth is “a damn fool.”
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
