Hannah and the Porcupine
I know I haven’t been in touch much since last year, but I took on a new role at work and things have been even nuttier than usual. As most of you know, last year I was on the Anchorage Yule Moose team and just starting to consult with other teams from around the country and even around the world. Did you know that crows in Europe aren’t all black? Imagine my surprise when I heard someone call out to me in Raven – it’s one of the 12 languages I speak fluently and comes in handy up here in the frozen tundra. I turned around to see a sleek gray vest across the usual black feathers. The gentleman to whom I was speaking seemed to object slightly when one of his colleagues pointed out that he was a Carrion Crow who like to speak Raven to put on airs. From my perspective, he was smart as a whip and a real help in solving that sticky puzzle in Prague.
As usual, I’m rambling a bit, but I’ll try to stay on task here. Since I last visited to share news of the world of Yule Engineering, I’ve been promoted to a Yule Rapid Response Team or YRRT (pronounced “yurt”). The team is made up of Yule scientists across a number of different disciplines and we travel around the world to respond to crisis situations. As you might imagine, there are emergency situations that actually threaten Christmas – these are quite serious and can involve several response teams working together. There are also smaller threats throughout the winter that can compromise the inner warmth that keeps us all going during the cold and dark months. Imagine, if you will, a storyteller with writer’s block, a starry sky that’s been behind clouds for months on end, a tone deaf town with no carolers – the list goes on and on.
A few of you were somewhat skeptical when we talked about Yule Sciences last year. I hope that as a result of getting to know me and my work, your skepticism has lifted a little. I’ve never personally had to get through a winter without the magic our integrated Yule approach creates, but I do know that there are those who can’t see it, feel it, smell it…or believe it. If you’re still in that category, let’s talk more. I wouldn’t want anyone I know to live through a winter in such a deprived state. .
Back to the science. In my new role as a YRRT member, I bring two really essential disciplines to the table – Light Sciences and Child Whispering. Light Sciences may make sense to even the most skeptical among you. We all know there are different wavelengths of light and that only a very small spectrum is actually visible to the human eye, though not all creatures are quite as limited. We also know that the energy from the wavelengths not visible to us still has a profound impact – as with ultraviolet radiation, for example. If we want to depart just a bit from what you humans consider the strictly scientific realm we can think about the emotional impact different colors have on us and that may be the easiest way to start understanding how I study light.
A lot of what I do deals with lights in the sky and how they affect the collective sense of things for an entire population. Let’s delve into this just a bit. How does a harvest moon affect you? What does it mean? Why is a pink and purple sunset romantic? And why is a shaft of nearly pure white light piercing through a break in the clouds inspirational? We could even talk about how different qualities of light can be used to predict weather. What farmer doesn’t know that purple clouds mean snow? I don’t know how it is where you live, but I know our local weatherman would do better to get his nose out of the scope and just look outside.
I could bore everyone right into a long winter’s nap by describing all of the different tests and metrics and calculations, but here’s the point. Light affects everything from how we feel to what our senses tell us, and if you’ve ever had a sunburn, you know that you can use your skin and your sense of touch to feel beyond the visible spectrum. Light even has an influence on which direction the weather will turn. No purple clouds, no snow. It’s as simple as that – even the most pregnant cumulus won’t let go of a single flake if purples are missing from the spectrum.
That’s where our story really begins…
To really understand what went so terribly wrong for Porcupine, it’s helpful to know a little bit about snow. The simplest way to think about it is that the further north you go, the more important snow becomes. If you live closer to the equator, you get lots of full spectrum light in the form of sunshine. Every degree of latitude further north takes you into longer and longer winter nights and less time in the sunlight. This isn’t a bad thing, mind you. Northern folk are the best singers, dancers and storytellers in the world because they know how to fill long winter evenings with light and energy. The thing about snow, though, is that it it carries light, makes it dance, shifts its direction and purpose. If you’re not quite sure what I’m talking about, Google Aurora Borealis or simply imagine a classic Christmas card image of a lighted tree on a snowy night. Crisp, cold winter nights and blankets of snow are absolutely essential to the movement of light through a winter night. And for north country folk who don’t get our their full spectrum light all in one place, the magic of individual reds and greens and violets goes a long way toward filling the world…and the heart…with light.
Now let’s consider Porcupine. He’s nocturnal, and that can’t mean anything good in terms of him feeling rested and refreshed during a time of year when it’s night for 18 to 20 hours at a go. He doesn’t get a pretty winter coat like the foxes and snowshoe hares do. He doesn’t get to hibernate like the bears and he’s not long and lean and leggy to get through drifts of snow like we moose are. And let’s face it – when was the last time you saw a cute picture of a porcupine stringing up Christmas lights? It’s the racoons and squirrels and smaller birds that get that honor. No, through the entire winter, Porcupine gets no attention, has no new pretty winter coat to wear and doesn’t even have the solace of sleeping through it all. Here’s the worst part – your average porcupine has about an inch and a half of ground clearance and the first inch and a half of snow is on the ground by the end of October. Not considered a warm and cuddly critter in the best of circumstances, porcupines can get downright cantankerous by the middle of December.
The other thing about porcupines is that we forget all about them. So, when my YRRT team was called in to investigate a massive theft of purple along the west coast of Canada and up into Alaska, it never occured to us to consider porcupines as a threat to Yule security. Let’s face it, they may not be the cuddliest of creatures, but unless you’re a Golden Retriever, they’re rarely troublemakers either.
We first started watching the Purple situation carefully back in November. Different YRRT’s monitor contributing factors across most of the human experience to try and predict problem spots where Yuletide Joy might be affected by something as simple as the inability in an entire community to smell cinnamon and nutmeg. And in case you’re wondering, yes I am speaking from personal experience on that one. A wolf of my acquaintance spends hours howling into the night checking the resonance of sound in the night air to assess shifts that could affect communication, mood, even weather. A wolf howl consists of up to 12 harmonically related overtones, so they’re just as perfect suited to working with sound waves as moose are to working with the dream currents of small humans.
But I digress again. I suppose I’m skirting around talking about purple because it’s really quite complicated. Purple, you see, is one thing but violet is quite another. Purple pigment can be reproduced using blue and red whereas violet is a distinct spectral wavelength. Feelings about purple can be complex as well – it’s the color of both royalty and passion. Purple velvet drapes, for example, might make a human uncertain as to whether she was in a throne room or a brothel. Bring to mind all the different purple flowers you know from the simplicity of a pansy to the tough tenacity of a thistle (yum!!) to the grace of an orchid and that will give you an inkling of how complex it can be to monitor the behavior of purple. To reinforce the feelings of hope, community, joy and so on that make up the yule spectrum, we work quite a bit with weather and seasons, so I’d like you also to imagine a color wheel. If you haven’t looked at one for awhile, purple is across the wheel from green – just as green is a color that brings light and life into the world in spring, purple is a color that guides us safely into the dark of winter. Simply put, it’s the Equinox color and without it, we’d be hard pressed to turn the corner from fall into winter.
I think that’s why we started seeing the signs in November. At first, there was really no sign of fall coming to a close, at least not in the trouble spots we’d been monitoring. Even as far south as Seattle, Portland and to some degree San Francisco, there have been bizarre alternations of lingering warm days with unseasonable cold. Meanwhile up in the Far North, winter just didn’t come for awhile and then when it did, it was in the form of record snowfall – big fluffy piles of it all over the place. It was almost as if there had been a blockage in the snow pipeline and when it blew free, all of a sudden huge sweeps and drifts dumped out all over the place.
This is, by the way, exactly what happened.
You may be wondering why on earth we were concerned about too much snow when I spent so much time last year investigating the theft of our Anchorage snow by the Wheedle of Seattle Space Needle fame (he’s been recruited, by the way, for the Pacific Northwest Division of the import/export YRRT. The “products” they oversee movement on are a little different than what you might imagine inside a standard shipping container, but the idea is a lot like Port Authority.
We were concerned not so much by the amount of snow as by the vast movement of it. It’s not just that there was a lot of snow – everyone launched into full Christmas spirit well before Thanksgiving and though no one realized it at the time, there’s always a price to pay for this. It’s a little like getting drunk instead of tipsy – may be enjoyable for a bit, but the hangover is hell. Well, the hangover did come and then some.
Let’s go back to that clogged pipe idea for a moment. Let’s suppose for a moment that some evil mastermind could actually hold back the snow, but his power failed him, the dam broke and everything came gushing through at once. What kind of force would all that built up energy create? I can tell you using the color wheel – a glut of purple stored up, hoarded if you will, in one place will, when freed, create a giant surge of energy that will pull green along for the ride. In the case we’ve been following for these past weeks, the sudden tug on green even confused the poor Chinook. Thinking from the huge swoosh of green energy that it might be spring, he woke up and started blowing…60 to 90 mph. And that would be gale force warm wind sweeping across all that snow and sweeping across all those people who were feeling a little hung over from a glut of purple. It was disastrous…and it was right before Christmas.
Stay tuned for more from Hannah tomorrow!
