Cold

My little one is gone again for a few days, and, as always when she's with her mother, the house seems -- and is -- very empty without her. Also, it's very cold.

This is deliberate. I have always preferred cold weather, and left to my own devices, prefer to keep the furnace turned down or completely off. Right now the temperature is in the low fifties and falling; it will be in the upper forties in my bedroom when I wake up tomorrow.

What is it about the cold and the winter that has always held an almost magical attraction, at least for me? In our family albums, there are photos of me as a small boy in Maine, playing in several feet of snow when the temperature was below minus 30. Two summers ago, in a road trip to Alaska and the Yukon with my brother, I got to swim in the Arctic Ocean at Prudhoe Bay, and loved it. The day was cold (about 40 degrees) and very windy, and the pebbly beach was roiled by chalk-colored waves. I plunged into the 34 degree water and swam around for a few minutes, earning a meaningless "polar bear certificate" into the bargain. In the wilds of Alaska and the Canadian far north, I got used to bathing in haste in frigid, glacier-fed streams and sleeping in a tent in near or below-freezing temperatures.

For me, the winter cold is emblematic of the northlands, which I love more than any other region of the globe; and the north means freedom. Long ago, certain of the wayward Israelites fled to unspecified "north countries" in hopes of keeping the statutes of God, which they had never been too successful at doing in the gentler, softer Levantine region.

It was Montesquieu, in that portion of Spirit of the Laws that practically no one bothers to read nowadays, who speculated that soft climates make for soft men. He pointed out that the freest peoples generally live in cold or mountainous areas; whereas the tropical and temperate climes have mostly nurtured autocracy. To the jaundiced modern eye, that might seem like an absurd generalization, but no one who has spent time in the comparatively epicene cultures of the Asian tropics (as I have -- India and Sri Lanka in particular) could altogether disagree.

The people whose laws and culture became Western Civilization (the Germanic tribes, whose descendants people all of the nations of northwest Europe, and whose blood, thanks to the southward irruption of the Lombards and the later Medieval movements of the Normans into Italy and the Balkans, is even heavily mingled with that of the peoples of the northern Mediterranean) were from unspecified northern regions of Asia. They settled in the vast "Hercynian Forest) of northern Europe and eventually became (if the authority of Turner, the Anglo-Saxons' first great historian, is to be accepted) a sort of refuge for expatriate Romans wishing to escape the bondage of living in that decrepit empire. It was they who truly discovered popular government of the sort we know today -- the Icelandic Althing, the Anglo-Saxon Witenagemot, and quite probably the distinctives of English common law -- trial by jury and the system of writs -- were innovations of the Germanic people at some stage, though the precise origin of such institutions is a matter of dispute.

Even today, most (though not all) of the world's freest countries are northerly -- the United States and Canada, Finland, Switzerland, Holland, Norway, and Denmark come to mind (yes, I know some of the aforementioned are socialistic, but they aren't a patch on the more despotic varieties of socialism preferred in Africa, Asia, and Latin America). Russia is of course the great exception, but there too, things appear to be changing.

As for the freest place on earth, that would have to be Alaska, almost a country in its own right. Those of us who have been there can understand why the "last frontier" attracts a certain breed of men: vast stretches of extremely hostile, unforgiving wilderness, long, cold, dark winters, and a lot of people who prefer, shall we say, to do their own thing. Alaska holds little attraction for those who abhor risk, who expect society to take care of them, and who do not like physical discomfort -- that is to say, most of the human race.

Which brings me back to the cold. As will become apparent as this blog progresses, I love liberty -- some say too much. Liberty requires first and foremost a denial of self -- what the Founding Fathers meant when they spoke of "virtue." Liberty has no place among the effete, the soft, the lazy, self-serving, or the pleasure-loving. It is an active impulse that disdains needless luxuries. It is best appreciated under some degree of self-denial; hence it is that so very few of the wealthy -- those who benefit the most from the bounties of liberty -- actually prefer freedom to the gentle bondage of luxury and privilege. Most of the men who fought the Revolutionary War -- who fought it, I mean, as opposed to watching from the sidelines and hedging their bets (and their business dealings) -- were poor men from "the sticks," men of little means but who knew how to shoot. The sacrifice of Dr. Warren at Bunker Hill stands out for its singularity: a man of privilege and status who insisted on fighting and dying on the front lines, despite being appointed a general.

Likewise is freedom popular here in the hills of western Pennsylvania, where few households are unarmed and government, especially the one down DC way, is viewed with narrow suspicion.

The other day, in the bitter cold and sleet, I went up the mountain to pay my parents a visit. No fewer than seven cars were parked at the bottom of their road, all belonging to hunters who were out in their tree stands waiting for a deer to happen by. This in weather that would send city folks scurrying chipmunk-like from the toasty warmth of offices and delis to the protective coccoons of their cars.

Our people prefer the snow and the cold, not to mention the solitude of the forests. I prefer them too, which is why I'll never live in a large city. I enjoy being alone, and I enjoy the outdoors for its own sake. But more even that that, I enjoy being a free man.