Can you feel it? The squirrels do. Bats do. Crickets, rats and deer do. You better believe hummingbirds do. Now that fall is in the air, all of Nature can feel the dread of impending winter.
Boxelder bugs burrow under leaves and bark in preparation for the cold. Chickadees build insulated nests. Snowshoe rabbits change their fur white to better hide from ravenous predators. Chipmunks furiously gather acorns into undergrounds storehouses. Monarch butterflies fuel up on milkweed to make that 3,000-mile pilgrimage to the oyamel fir forests in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Mexico. Geese, ducks and goldfinches are all getting the heck out of Dodge. Winter anxiety is in the air. Even we technologically privileged humans are not immune.
Buried deep in our DNA—maybe in the 3% that comes from our Neanderthal ancestors, those hearty, hairy Ice Age survivors, wise in the ways of getting through brutal winters–there lies a warning that resonates to this day. Get ready for the cold, or freeze. In rural Alaska, they have a saying at the onset of winter. “Did you get your elk?” Because if you did, you’ll probably make it until spring. Neanderthals may have had their own version. “Did you get your mammoth?” And if you did, you got some serious bragging rights for taking down a ferocious wild beast the size of a two-stall garage using nothing but a stone-tipped spear.
There are plenty of reasons to feel anxious in the fall. I love it in the summer when it’s light until nine o’clock at night and you can walk around barefoot and you don’t have to think about coats and gloves and frostbite. But those carefree days will soon be behind us. Some people are prone to Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), a kind of depression caused by the reduced winter sunlight. Some studies show a connection between the decreased vitamin D we get from sunshine and increased anxiety. Although it doesn’t make the sun shine any less, Daylight Saving Time throws off our internal clock and makes us feel we are living more of our life in the dark.
Then there’s Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s Day and driving for miles in the snow and turkey and mashed potatoes and pie. Bears have to bulk up for winter because they stop eating when they hibernate. If bears kept eating all winter, they’d just get fatter and fatter. But humans are not allowed to hibernate because we have to work and buy Christmas presents and shovel the sidewalk and take the kids to basketball practice and ballet lessons.
There’s a groundhog that lives in a hole in the yard. There could be a dozen of them for all I know. They all look alike to me. I figure he’s got it pretty good. There’s plenty for him to eat. He never seems to work that hard. He’s got no reason to worry. Sometimes he catches me watching him and returns my gaze with what I imagine to be a look of superiority, knowing he gets to sleep all winter in his cozy little underground den. And I have to live with the cold. Sucker.