March 17

It being St. Patrick's Day and all, I thought I'd offer this story I wrote years ago. It was an exercise in using every cliche about Ireland I could think of. I sometimes send it out to friends, especially Irish friends, on March 17. Most of them are still speaking to me.

An Irish Lilt

One June day three years ago Victor "Paddy" O'Sullivan, a retired shillelagh whittler out gathering shamrocks in a country field, had a sudden idea that led him to a cache of leprechaun gold. Now, sure and it wouldn't be fair to tell ye what he did, for it's a simple trick that anyone might apply, and if I let it out of the bag there soon wouldn't be a single glittering nugget left in the whole of the Emerald Isle.

Does my accent sound phony? You can bet it does, for I am about as Irish as Victor "Paddy" O'Sullivan, an immigrant Pole who had shortened his name from Osylyvnchwzsky. However, for the sake of the story I ask that you try not to wince too much if and when, periodically, I give into the temptation to lay on the blarney in brogue.

Back then, o'er the Big Drink, to the paddocks and leas of Ireland.

When the leprechaun who owned the pot of gold discovered it was missing, he flew into a rage the lake of which was never described even by Sean O'Faolain, James Joyce or Frank O'Connor. He tore out great handfuls of his long white hair and flung them about. As soon as they touched the ground, the hairs turned into worms and wriggled out of sight. His piercing cries, which sounded more like a banshee's than a leprechaun's, struck terror into not a few of his comrades.

"Have thee gone mad?" they exclaimed from their shelters behind mushrooms, knolls and carbuncles.

"Ithic!" he wailed in leprechaunese. "Ithic lander lll!" (Free translation: "My gold is gone! Gone!")

"Gone?" they cried in one voice. Whereupon these pint-sized misers, fearing that their own hoards may also have been plundered, went dashing away to check, leaving their poor dispossessed fellow to continue his lamentations.

Paddy, meanwhile, having turned in the gold for paper currency, was leading the life of Riley. He went around with a colleen on each arm, and one elsewhere. He drank only the best whisky; his feet were always well shod. He cut the figure of a fine elderly country gentleman, swathed in green from tip to toe. His neighbors, being Irishmen, were secretly envious of Paddy's sudden wealth, which he had told them came from an inheritance. Sucking on their long stem pipes and crooking their hoary eyebrows, they would ponder among themselves the weighty questions of luck and justice whenever Paddy strolled by, his three buxom colleens in tow.

Leprechauns see more than they are seen, and so know more about others than others know about them. They knew, for example, all about Paddy's non-Irish ancestry, despite the infinite pains he had taken to conceal it. Also, it did not take much leprechaun magic to infer from Paddy's newfound finery that he was the thief. I should mention that while men regard leprechaun gold as fair game, belonging, like pirate treasure, to whoever finds it, the leprechauns themselves do not subscribe to this belief. Each of them spends thousands of years amassing his hoard, and its disappearance is a setback of no small import. Reclaiming Paddy's ill-gotten gold was obviously impossible, since it had already been converted into coin of the realm. But the fear of every leprechaun was that Paddy, after using up his fortune, would seek to replenish it from another store -- for while they knew his trick for calculating the hiding place of their gold, they were powerless to do anything about it. Now leprechauns, though they be but wee folk, have a giant-sized thirst for revenge. So one night at a secret gathering place, all the leprechauns from miles around put their heads together and came up with a plan that they hoped would avenge the theft and ensure that it would not be repeated. To help carry out the details they even hired a poltergeist, who was better-versed in such matters.

First, through the vehicle of one of his colleens, they gave Paddy as fine a dose of the clap as y'd e'er expect to see. Next, they put it into the head of Mrs. Murphy, the local gossip, that Paddy was not, as he'd maintained all these years, a full-blooded Irishman but Pole from Cracow. Now, Mrs. Murphy had a truly fearsome gift o' gab, and before long this rumor was bruiting through the county. It dashed a mortal blow to Paddy's hopes of being chosen Head Shillelagh for the St. Patty's Day parade, an honor he had coveted for three decades and for which this year he had considered himself a shoo-in.

These two were the first in a series of greater and lesser misfortunes to afflict the apostate Pole: everything from slipping in some good Irish cow dung to being creamed with a roundhouse by the middleweight pug Rourke O'Rourke. Leprechaun revenge is slapstick in style, not vicious but exceedingly trying. Soon Paddy was a laughingstock; now whenever he passed by his neighbors, they would as before discuss the weighty questions of luck and justice, but this time with winks and jocular pokes of the elbow.

It did not escape Paddy's notice that the mishaps were flying a wee bit too thick and fast to be coincidences. He had studied Irish lore at one of the top o'universities in Dublin soon after emigrating, and so had a good grounding in leprechaun mentality, which he recognized at work here. He recalled, however, that a fresh shamrock had inimitable value in warding off the little men's whammies. So he got into his trap and rode down to the county nursery, where he purchased a bulk supply of the fine clover. This he scattered about his person, his house and his colleens. "Now sure 'n I'll be as safe as a green frog in green grass," he thought confidently, still with an eye to being chosen the Head Shillelagh for next year.

But Paddy's countermeasure came too late to halt the leprechaun's supreme vengeance, which was already on its way. That very afternoon who should come hobbling down the lane but an auld woman, garbed all in black. Her back was stooped, her head bowed, but even from a distance a vague familiarity played about her withered form. It was Paddy's long-abandoned mother, Mariewschka Osylyvnchwzsky.

"So I've found ye at last!" the old woman cried in her Polish tongue.

"Faith and begorra," Paddy said out loud in Irish. "Sure and that couldn't be my old Mamawicz. Why, she must be at the far end of her eighties by now!"

The ancient Pole did not understand a word of Paddy's brogue but immediately recognized her own nickname, which Paddy had inadvertently uttered. Seizing her son's ears, she shook his head long a vigorously. Paddy squirmed and struggling but could not twist himself free, for despite her age and some stiffness in the joints, Mama O's physical powers were still awesome.

"Faith, Mamawicz, faith! Sure 'n begorra! Bladdaboushsky takawicz obstrepchevsky!" Paddy protested. In the heat of the moment he was relapsing into his native Polish, which had not crossed his lips for thirty years. Hearing this, Mama Osylyvnchwzsky redoubled her shaking, accompanying it with loud scoldings and imprecations which could be heard for miles around and set many neighbors' tongues to wagging. "Sure 'n what be this ungodly speech concernin'?" whispered one and all.

Mama O, it turned out, had been combing the globe for Paddy since that bleak winter day thirty years ago, when he had slipped off without a word. Her travels had taken her from Bangkok to Buenos Aires, Shanghai to Seattle. Single-handedly she had carved her way through the malarious forests of Cameroon, scoured both banks of the Irriwaddy for her son's footprints, searched New York house to house. Quite a life she had led since Paddy's disappearance. But it was only last week that the collective telepathy of numberless leprechauns reached across the world to Java, where her search had taken her, and put her on the right track to her wayward son.

Mama O wanted Paddy to return with her at once to Cracow, a prospect which horrified Paddy. It was from her iron rule he had fled in the first place. To go back now would spell the end of his carefree dissolute existence -- his colleens, his shindies, his topes of whisky, his tam o'shanters. But Paddy had never been able to argue down his mother, and years of hard living had made her even more formidable. Besides, the jig was up on Paddy's Irish identity. The few Irishmen who had doubted Mrs. Murphy's gossipmongering would surely have been convinced by Mariewschka Osylyvnchwzsky's incomprehensible shouts. So in the end Paddy bowed to the storm and returned to Poland, much to the glee of the leprechaun community, whose remaining hoards of gold were now safe.

Today, Victor (as he now prefers to be called) lives with his mother in the family home in Cracow. His shillelagh whittler's pension has, of course, been stopped, but he still has enough of a fortune to live on its interest in comfortable retirement. Victor doesn't dwell much on his memories of Ireland, so he tells me. Instead, encouraged by his mother, he is working hard to reestablish himself as a pillar of Cracow society, in the hope of one year being chosen Cabbage Roll King during the St. Wojciech's Day festival in April.

February 28

It's always great to see the layout of your book for the first time. It makes the project real. Seeing the first galleys has even more impact than when the printed book arrives.

Have spent much of the week doing layout tweaks and writing 150 captions. My approach with captions is to get the idea down, then start taking away from them until you can't take away any more. Until they're like little haiku poems.

February 23

With my new book, Arctic Eden, out in a few months, I've been dealing a lot with editors and copy editors and have been forced to re-evaluate how I spell "Arctic". I prefer to spell Arctic with a capital "A" as a noun and a small "a" as an adjective. It's simple, clear and makes sense: the Arctic; arctic hare; arctic expedition. That's how I spelled it in The Horizontal Everest; I wanted to follow the same rule in this latest book, too. Unfortunately, I could not find a dictionary or style guide anywhere that supported this preference.

I even sought out an old friend, copy editor Susan Dickinson. Susan copy edited my first book; she also copy edits for Canadian Geographic magazine. She's been in the business a long time. She knows her stuff. This is what she wrote me about the Arctic vs arctic issue:

First, we'll agree that when used as a noun, "Arctic" refers to the region north of the Arctic Circle, and when used as an adjective, "Arctic or arctic" means "of or relating to or suitable for use at the North Pole or the regions near it."

Dictionaries present "arctic" as the adjective, with the notation "often cap." Oxford and Random House prefer Arctic fox, Arctic hare, Arctic char, etc., while Webster's suggests lowercase for animal names. So then it comes down to a question of style.

Although you would prefer to do lowercase whenever "arctic" is used as an adjective, there are instances when uppercase is required. For example, an "Arctic expedition" refers to an expedition to the Arctic, and an "Arctic community" is a community located in the Arctic. And I would refer to your project as an "Arctic book" (a book about the Arctic).

Here's another one: "There's an Arctic air mass moving into Northern Ontario, and I'm going to have to pack my arctic clothing before I drive to Sudbury." Here, we're referring to a weather front that actually originated in the Arctic; "Northern Ontario" is an officially recognized region, hence the uppercase "N"; and "arctic clothing" simply means clothes that are suitable for extremely cold weather.

Here are two specific reference books that briefly mention the subject:

"Editing Canadian English" by the Freelance Editors' Association of Canada: uppercase when referring to the region; lowercase when referring to frigid temperatures; in established names of Arctic flora and fauna, usually lowercase: arctic gale; arctic char; Arctic community. [Note that it's "Arctic flora and fauna," which means flora and fauna found in the Arctic, and "Arctic community."]

The Chicago Manual of Style: prefers a parsimonious use of capitals; although proper names are capitalized, many words derived from or associated with proper names may be lowercased with no loss of clarity; lowercase when used metaphorically, as in "experiencing arctic weather in Orlando": Arctic waters; a mass of Arctic air. [Note the previous two usages: water found in the Arctic and an air mass that has formed in or is moving from the Arctic.]

If you can mentally flip the expression around and it means literally "of, belonging to, found in the Arctic," then uppercase is correct (Arctic expedition, travel, community, knowledge, etc.). In the case of weather, it could go either way depending on whether a front is moving from the Arctic into another region or whether the word "arctic" is being used simply to emphasize how bitterly cold it is (it was like an arctic gale during the blizzard).

February 19

The three best books on cold in my library are Bernd Heinrich's Winter World, which emphasizes natural history, Snow in America, by Bernard Mergen, and Bill Streever's recent book, simply called Cold. This last one looks unpromising because of its crappy cover, with poor typography, a dull blurb and a hazy polar bear lost in a greenish mist that is presumably ice fog. I saw it in bookstores but passed over it because of the cover. But reviews praised the depth of the book and I eventually gave it a try. The reviews were right, the cover impression wrong. Like the other two works, this is a labor of love constructed over a period of years of thought and experience. It's full of original tidbits that you don't read anywhere else. It doesn't just recycle the old "one must have a mind of winter" cliches.

February 13

One of my all-time favorite travel pieces is the late David Foster Wallace's classic Harper's article, Shipping Out, or A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, about his tropical cruise on what he called the good ship Nadir. I lecture for Adventure Canada's cruises on small ships in the Arctic, and the experience and the people are totally different from those who board floating cities, with casinos and malls, that ply sultry tropical seas, like the one Wallace joined. Arctic visitors are interested in the place; tropical tourists mainly want to be pampered. It's a generalization, but I call it like I see it. Wallace's obsessive, almost superhuman curiosity will have you peeing your pants with laughter, if you are so inclined.

February 2

A few years ago, I visited Punxsutawney, Pennnsylvania on Groundhog Day for a book on winter that I was writing. The book never came off, and the fragment from Punxsutawney remains unpublished. Here it is, as a Groundhog Day special:

Three inches of wet snow overnight have turned Punxsutawney into the slush capital as well as the weather capital of North America. Pedestrians, and there are thousands of us, perform little ballet hops at curbs. Drivers along the main street of West Mahoning creep along in that distracted tourist way, one eye looking for a parking spot, the other eye simply looking.

It is February 1, the day before Groundhog Day. Since 1896, this town in western Pennsylvania has represented Groundhog Day in the same way that Times Square gives a geographical focus to New Year’s. For two days each year, fire-eaters, storytellers, beauty queens, men in top hats and tuxedos and up to four times Punxsutawney’s normal population of 6,800 throng the streets. (Not bad for a place with only 150 hotel rooms.) The rest of the time Punxsutawney is either “quiet” or “dead”, according to residents. Stores are simple and ungentrified: Quaint shoppes can’t survive on two days of action and 363 days of the sort of customer Bruce Springsteen sings about.

Groundhog Day is a school holiday in this part of Pennsylvania, but that’s because all 150 school buses in the district are commandeered to bring spectators to Gobbler’s Knob, a clearing on the outskirts of town where Phil, the celebrated groundhog, predicts whether or not there will be six more weeks of winter.

Groundhog Day doesn’t exist in Europe but it began there. Candlemas was a pagan festival of light, in honor of Februa, the mother of Mars, in Roman times and Brigid, goddess of fire, in Celtic lore. Like many pagan rituals, it was later adopted by the church, which grafted on a Christian tradition and made it a day on which to bless the altar candles. Secular candles also burned in all the village windows that evening. Although Candlemas is considered halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, February 4 is the true midpoint of winter.

In the 1700s, when German settlers arrived in what later became Pennsylvania, they brought a folk belief associated with Candlemas, that if a hibernating animal – a hedgehog, a badger, sometimes even a bear – saw its shadow on that day, six more weeks of wintry weather would follow. The British had a stripped-down version of the same idea: Winter would continue if February 2 was sunny, while cloudy weather (no shadows) foretold an early spring.

It was the German version that took hold in North America. A local hibernator, the groundhog, became the foreteller. Although the first Pennsylvanian reference to the tradition was in 1841, it wasn’t until 1887 that the local newspaper in Punxsutawney, a coal-mining town 80 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, organized the first Groundhog Day festival. The groundhog was called Punxsutawney Phil, and organizers added a string of whimsical credentials after his name, “Seer of Seers, Sage of Sages, Prognosticator of Prognosticators” that have remained part of the tradition.

The growing popularity of Groundhog Day has spawned pretenders to Phil’s mantle. Nowadays, there are at least 27 groundhog forecasters in North America, including General Beauregard Lee in Atlanta, where winter is a relative term, and Wiarton Willie in Canada, where it is not. There are even events involving a llama, a crayfish and a prognosticating chicken, which “isn’t technically even a groundhog,” as Punxsutawney loyalists archly point out.

Some of these events are charmingly local. In one recent year, 30 people attended the prediction of western New York’s Dunkirk Dave. By contrast, Punxsutawney enlists five times that number of state troopers to keep order. Punxsutawney Phil has maintained his status as America’s unofficial official groundhog partly because being first confers an advantage and partly thanks to the entrepreneurs of the Groundhog Club. They recognized early that unlike coal, Groundhog Day is a renewable resource.

In the late 1940s and 1950s – when The New York Times was harumphing how the Groundhog Day superstition is “beyond understanding” – three far-sighted people in Punxsutawney introduced Phil to a larger world. Frank Lorenzo, president of the Groundhog Club, brought dignitaries and media by train from Pittsburgh and neighboring states for the event. Sam Light, who succeeded him, established the popular tradition of top hats and tails. His wife Elaine was a former AP reporter from Pittsburgh who met her future husband while writing one of her popular yearly articles on Groundhog Day.  The pair eventually built the civic center where Phil and his understudies are housed in glassed-in quarters all year.

The single biggest boost to Punxsutawney’s fame was the 1992 movie Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray plays a man trapped in a time loop, where every day is Groundhog Day. Since the movie’s release, attendance in Punxsutawney has swelled from 1,500 to the 15,000 typical today. And the Groundhog Club has kept pace with modern times: Phil’s website, groundhog.org,  is the first listing in a Google search of “groundhog”.

I wander West Mahoning Street in the drizzle. I sample groundhog cookies (bland, despite Elaine Light’s celebrated groundhog-themed cookbooks) and knock back some burned-bean coffee and carminative chili at the one café in town. A rangy man in a tuxedo and top hat, one of the Inner Circle of the Groundhog Club, sits at a table giggling hysterically at a friend’s joke. You don’t often see people in tuxedos giggling. Tourists jam the tiny souvenir shop that doubles as the Chamber of Commerce and sells Phil T-shirts, funny hats and Beanie Babies. The Beanie Baby labels have deliberately misspelled Phil’s name, to distinguish them from the authentic, limited-edition version snapped up by locals long before Groundhog Day and selling on eBay for hundreds of dollars.

I visit a weather museum nearby, where for two dollars you can buy into the notion of Punxsutawney as the weather capital of America. I have just missed Miss Pennsylvania, but Phil is there in his glass cage, and so is a member of the Inner Circle in his top hat, posing for digital photos with visitors.

Since I am not one of the lucky 150 with a hotel room, I return to the car, parked behind the funeral home of Bill Deeley, Phil’s official handler. I lower the seat and nap till 3am, when the fleet of yellow school buses begin shuttling spectators to Gobbler’s Knob. I get on the first bus.  The Knob is a natural amphitheater where the ground slopes toward the stage. I position myself stageside by the artificial stump, with its fairytale-like doors, in which Phil purportedly hibernates. Although it is mild and I am wearing six layers on top and three on bottom, my running shoes transfer the cold through my entire body. I am colder standing here in 20ºF than I am sledding across the Arctic at –40º. Little wonder that the Punxsutawney hospital routinely treats victims of hypothermia on Groundhog Day.

The crowd builds steadily. A lot of students: Colleges surround Punxsutawney. Many in the crowd carry signs: “Phil, will you marry me?” or “Ben, what time is it?” referring to the top-hatted timekeeper with a giant alarm clock around his neck. With the lack of accommodation, most have driven here overnight from nearby states and counties, but they also flock here from all over North America. Some come every year. Others are celebrating their birthday. Incredibly, a few have come to get married. A member of the Inner Circle will preside at the ceremony.

By six am, twenty thousand have gathered. As far as I know, an event of this magnitude at 7:30 am is unique. A young woman from France comments to me, not unsympathetically, how only Americans can be so passionate about frivolous events.

The governor of Pennsylvania himself shows up, a first. Fireworks, speeches, God Bless America – then Phil’s handler, Bill Deeley, steps forward and ceremoniously raps three times on Phil’s stump. Then he opens the door and lifts Phil out. Phil does not bite his finger or take a whizz, as he has some years. Grandiloquently, Deeley recites some poetry-gibberish. The gist is that Phil has seen his shadow and there will be six more weeks of winter. All but the skiers in the crowd groan loudly.

Phil’s pronunciamento is not surprising: In 118 years, he has forecast an early spring just 14 times. Although his promoters credit him with a hundred percent accuracy, a recent study by the Chicago Tribune puts him at just thirty-nine percent. Several less-famous groundhogs, subjected to less scrutiny, have better records.

The party quickly breaks up. The photographers, with whom I’ve been standing, run to download their images to their laptops and e-mail them to their editors. The governor stands around, somewhat a forgotten man, and I chat with him a bit. A nearby photographer, who earlier did not seem to know how his fancy equipment worked, stands poised to tackle me if I make a wrong move.

Truth to tell, I am almost too cold to make any move at all. But with the standing done, my circulation slowly returns. I briskly walk the two miles back to town to warm up, stopping for breakfast at Joe’s Drive-In. Outside in the parking lot stands the world’s largest (and tackiest) groundhog statue. I order two cups of hot chocolate and a surprisingly inexpensive plate of French toast. When it comes, I see why: the toast looks like little chicken fingers. The taste is memorable and forgettable at the same time. It is a perfect end to my Groundhog Day, but I am grateful that this particular meal does not repeat itself over and over again in a time loop.