Secrets of Seattle Winter

“Ahhh,” I sighed with content, staring outside my office window. The sky was already pitch dark, with the only lights coming from storefronts, street lamps and cars buzzing by. I told myself that I must have been so laser focused that I lost track of time and that it must be eight pm or later. This dedicated work ethic will surely reflect well in my upcoming performance review. I’ll even start celebrating my impending promotion now, by staying up tonight for no reason, eating fried chicken and binge-watching TV shows I don’t even really like. Then I’ll sleep in and come to the office late tomorrow.

“Late night there, huh Dan?” someone will say as I waltz in.

I’ll sheepishly smile in response. “Work hard, play hard,” or some other campy platitude that importantly, also leaves things ambiguous.

And then reality tore through my imagination when I looked at my clock.

“It’s only five-thirty!?” I actually exclaimed, and much louder than I had intended.

“Welcome to Seattle, Dan,” my coworker laughed from across the room.

And so began my first Seattle winter, my first face-to-face contact with the darkness that truly scares everyone else away from this part of the United States, and I do mean literal darkness; you won’t actually be able to see anything because it will be pitch dark before five.

Make no mistake—Seattle is objectively a beautiful place, and I challenge you find someone who both disagrees, and isn’t entirely pessimistically nihilistic about everything—you know, considers that life is nothing more than an endurance test of how much you can suffer, and then you die.

The reason why more people don’t rush to move here for said beauty, is that you don’t actually get to witness Seattle’s beauty for most of the year, whether literally or metaphorically. A number of phrases exist to describe this weird trait of Seattle’s, of which my favorite is that Seattle is a super hot model that thinks that wearing extra baggy sweats, the same underwear for days, and not showering, is somehow okay. And gets away with it.

All that to say: Seattle is beautiful when it’s sunny, which is weather that’s nearly exclusive to the summertime, about a quarter of the year, if you’re lucky. The other three-fourths starts around mid-October, where it’s generally accepted that you should: plan on spending most of your time indoors, carry a completely waterproof jacket at all times, and your skin will turn several shades paler.

A clinical diagnosis would prescribe that for the first month or two, you’ll probably find this cute, or adorable even, but by April or May when you think spring has rolled around and therefore things should be different—but they’re not—everyone will be in a full on depression. It will be warmer, for sure, but it won’t be any less cloudy, dreary or grey. Everyone will be clawing at their existence, trying any means to survive, until mysteriously on July 5, a big yellow object will break through the clouds, everyone will remember the sky is actually bright blue, and summer will begin with a celebration of British expulsion. Truly patriotic, indeed.

If this sounds painful, it’s because it is. But pain can be fun and novel if it’s new and exciting, which is either an attitude of eternal optimists or masochists. That’s how I survived my first Seattle winter, by being both, and I think I honestly took it pretty well, all things considered.

The second, and every subsequent Seattle winter was an exercise in battling eternal sadness. There’s only so many cumulative days of dreariness before you begin to go insane. Many locals here have bought into Stockholm syndrome and have, over the years, produced a list of excuses to justify the situation should they encounter anyone who complains.

The weather is actually great, because it makes you appreciate the fewer-than-three months of summer. Sort of true, but this is one of those morally ambiguous “you must experience the bad times to appreciate the good” statements. Why can’t you just enjoy the good times on their own? I mean, I seriously doubt “so that he would understand how good it feels when I hug him” would fly in court to explain why I assaulted somebody.  

The weather is actually great, because it makes us stay indoors which makes us smarter.  This isn’t entirely false, but it’s clearly not true either. I don’t remember when “being forced to stay indoors” as if you were in a prison, was ever considered a good thing. And since there are no objective ways to measure intelligence, I’ll just toss out the fact that last time I checked, no Ivy League universities exist in the Pacific Northwest (or California, for that matter).

The weather is actually good for you, because the sun’s UV rays are harmful and you were never meant to live in its presence. My favorite. It’s one of those statements that pretends to make sense by combining factual information with strange analysis and emphatic interpretation. My coworker, Gabriel, used to love giving me this argument, listing off skin cancer, sunburns, eye damage, and every other scientifically-documented side effect of getting an excessive amount of sun over a prolonged period of time.

“Then why do you have a sun lamp on your desk?” I asked him once.

“Well, we do need a little vitamin D.”

Several months into the dead of winter, that’s what everyone will admit that they need: Vitamin D. Seattle is one of the few places I’ve been to where vitamin D consumption is an actual concern, as if we’re back in medieval days scrambling for vitamin C to stave off scurvy. This is when, regardless of whatever excuses they had before, everyone (Gabriel included) will start agreeing that no reasonable, rationally thinking human would somehow consider Seattle winters to be enjoyable.

There is a secret, however, to surviving these long, eight- or nine-month long seasonal bouts of grey depression. It’s not a well-guarded secret. In fact, it will be promoted to you non-stop, with companies like Alaska Airlines hitting you over the head with it by writing monthly features year-round. It’s just that the secret doesn’t feel like a solution until you admit you have a problem.

The secret is to leave.

Take your pick: Hawaii. Southern California. Mexico. Doesn’t matter. If you can relax on a sandy beach, wearing clothes only because the law requires it, it’ll do the trick.

I embraced this secret during my fourth Seattle winter, when I didn’t think I’d survive another season. In an unusual twist of fate, my UV-hating coworker Gabriel, walked up to me with a proposition: “Hey Dan, we’re gonna go to Hawaii. You wanna come?”

At first I thought he was joking, since “we” meant just him and his wife. Foresight said that going with a married couple would be weird at best and a terrible idea at worst that might ruin our friendship. At the very least, I knew I’d be flooded with “oh so how was the threesome” questions when I got home. There’s a category of activities that are off limits to you and your friends when they’re married, and you’re not.

“Hi Mom,” I imagined Gabriel’s wife, Clara, saying over the phone soon after we landed. “We’re out with picking up some food. No. Yes. No,” The conversation would go along briskly and no one would pay it any special attention. Until my name gets dropped.

“Oh yeah, it’s fine. Gabe and Dan are doing all the work.”

There’ll be a noticeable pause, and this is how I think Clara’s mom would step in.

“Who’s Dan?”

“Gabe’s coworker.”

“Oh, I didn’t know you were going with a group.”

“No, Dan’s the only other person.”

“Like, him and his girlfriend?”

“No, just him.”

Silence.

That’s how I expected the conversation to go, and I wanted no part of it. So I gave Gabriel the Seattle “no” and said I’d think about it. But he’s a native Seattleite and can’t be fooled. A few days later he asked me a second time, and you don’t turn down a chance to visit literal paradise twice. I booked my ticket the next day.

Suddenly, it didn’t matter that the weather forecast showed sadness, doom and gloom for the next seven days or even the next seven weeks. I had a ticket in hand and I was going to paradise.

And that, I realized, is part of the secret of this survival tactic: finding the light at the end of the tunnel, even if you have to manufacture it yourself.

Because the problem with Seattle winters isn’t that they’re unbearable. No, I’ve lived through Chicago winters, the kind where you feel as if knives are poking at your face because you missed a square centimeter when bundling a scarf around your head, or where it’s impossible to wear any more clothing and you just have to accept that you’ll be cold, or that you must prepare an extra ten minutes to enter or exit any building because of all the clothing you have to take off or put back on. By comparison, some rain, dreariness and eternal darkness isn’t actually all that bad.

No, the real problem with Seattle winters is that they’re long.

Choosing to go to a sunny paradise cuts that time in half. You spend the first month enjoying the change from the summer sun, and then the next month thinking well it’s not actually that bad. By the time you hit month three—when you’d probably start falling into some serious sadness—you get to tell yourself that paradise is on the horizon, and you’ll be just fine.

And let me tell you, paradise is glorious. When we touched down in Hawaii all I felt was beautiful, beautiful UV—that scorching feeling that you get on your skin where it’s just barely bearable. We rented a jeep and immediately pulled the top down, laughing while the wind brushed all over our smiling faces. Between Clara’s prior Maui experiences, Gabriel’s crazy-skilled and just crazy driving, and my whimsical attitude, we were already building memories.

“Hey, teach me some Polish,” I asked Gabriel randomly while admiring the rolling green hills. I’d heard him speak to his parents and always find learning phrases in other languages fun.

“Mały gówno.”

“What does that mean?”

Gabriel looked at me in the rearview mirror. “Little shit.”

I don’t know what it is about men, or if it’s even exclusive to men, but we always seem to reach for the bottom of the barrel when teaching languages to each other. As if the only things that can bond us together are also the least practical and most likely to offend, for also the least amount of effort. For the next five minutes and like moths to a flame, I repeated my newfound phrase over and over, in different tones trying to mimic Gabriel’s accent.

Mah-way goov-no. Muh-whey guhvnoa?

“Dan, are you drunk?” Clara turned around and laughed.

“Okay, one more,” I demanded, feeling like I had mastered the all important “little shit.”

“Zamknij się.”

“What does that mean?”

“Shut up.”

For a moment, I thought maybe I had crossed the line from cute to annoying and resigned myself to being quiet and watching the scenery pass us by. But then my mischievous brain started working again and I smirked.

“Zamknij się, mały gówno.”

Gabriel broke out laughing, swerving slightly out of lane. “Oh God, what have I done?”

Clara half-laughed, half-gasped. “Gabe, please just drive.”

The three of us made every minute of paradise count, to the point of excess. If it could be done outdoors, we did it outdoors: read books while our bodies burned, laid down on the beach with the sand shifting through your toes, ate practically every meal. We even did exercise outdoors. We ran, did pushups, even burpees. Burpees. The worst exercise created by humans.

When we were tired of that we ran to the beach, which does not exist in Seattle. Do not believe whatever propaganda people tell you otherwise, and you can prove it by taking pictures of the ocean in Hawaii and sending it to all your friends back in doom and gloom Seattle.

I did that once. I sent a photo to someone back home of the crisp, dark blue ocean crashing into the golden sand and reaching just the edges of my feet. I think having your feet in the photo is critical. My view, I typed.

Ass, my phone buzzed, this is what I’m looking at. It was thunderstorm clouds. Through a tiny basement window.

Not everything was great. On the first day, Clara got a phone call from her mother. I don’t think I have to tell you what conversation actually transpired, and suddenly I was reminded that I was there with a married couple by myself.

Which also meant they argued (because what else do couples actually do).

“Gabe, put on your seatbelt please.” Clara said, annoyed by the beeping sound the Jeep made as a safety precaution.

“It’s fine.”

“No, it’s annoying. Put your seatbelt on.”

She was right. It was getting annoying. But I wasn’t sure if my interjections would get me kicked out of their good graces, and I wasn’t about to be on paradise by myself.

“There,” he said, pulling his seatbelt into the buckle with a click. “Happy?”

“No, you should’ve done it sooner.”

I shrunk into my seat. I really wanted to be: “Guys, this is awkward for me.” but I’m pretty sure the only thing that would accomplish is give them another thing to argue about.

Not everything was great with Hawaii either. In our quest to find the best poke, one of us got food poisoned. In trying to relax for a fancy dinner, we fell into a luau tourist trap. We got so tired we couldn't will ourselves to wake up for a sunrise bike ride down a volcano (which, I suppose is something to add to next year's Hawaii visit).

And as much as we loved the sun, including watching it set at the far side of the ocean and turn the sky bright pink and orange, after one full week, I strangely found myself in full retreat. Like it was too sunny. I got tired of feeling like I was on the brink of sunburn. I started reading inside. I brought a big patio umbrella to the beach. I actually found myself craving Seattle’s cloudy doom and gloom, as if I had gone way too much to the other extreme, gotten too much sun and was ready to detox. As if I had overdosed on it if that were even possible. This strikes me as similar to a drug addiction although that’s no doubt an offensive comparison on some level.

And that, is the other half of the survival secret: leaving is like hitting the reset button.  If the first month of winter isn’t so bad, so is the first month back from sunny paradise. The clouds and rain feel like a nice reprieve from UV overdose as you settle back into old winter routines. You wonder if your trip was even real but then you see your tanned self in the mirror and remember that your body says yes it was. And then after a couple of months, it’s suddenly April or May, and since you now have an impending ticket for Seattle’s paradise-like summer, weathering the rest of the storm seems totally doable. Toss in one short weekend trip to California if you really can’t make it, and survival actually seems easy.

And it was easy. That winter passed without much whining from me. In fact, it worked so well, I made it a point to survive the next Seattle winter the exact same way, just with the addition of Gabriel and Clara’s newborn baby girl, and another friend Jason. Slightly different group, different Hawaiian island, but really, we got the same outcome. We overdosed on sun. Our skin burned a little. We did burpees outside, because why not.

We also replaced married couple fighting with married-couple-and-baby fighting. Because what else are children great for, if not to make their parents fight?

“Gabe, please don’t feed her the spicy sauce.”

“She loves spicy sauce!” he said, holding his daughter with one hand and a small amount of volcanic red goo on top of a french fry. “Here, try a little.”

Up until this exact moment—with Gabriel tenderly holding his baby girl like the amazing father he can be, and her slowly reaching out her tiny mouth to taste—there was world peace, unicorns were a real thing, and we were all one big happy family.

Without describing what happened next, all I’ll say is Jason and I exchanged glances, and without a word, both left the table because we didn’t feel our presence...helped, the situation, in any way.

And that’s how I learned to survive Seattle winters. Almost even learned to enjoy them, really. Leave. One week you’re indoors, staring at the ominous clouds and questioning if your memories of a blue sky are real. The next, you’re doing burpees outdoors because it’s sunny and because there’s a baby crying inside and you want to get away. Both can be true and I suppose, that’s how just life is.

A former version of myself would have claimed that if you have to leave something in order to fully enjoy it, your relationship with it is broken.

Now, I can’t help but wonder if that isn’t some way of accepting each other for who they truly are—extra baggy sweats-wearing, no showering, super hot model.