When I was young, I thought of them as mere caricatures: the old folks who went around talking about the old days when the snow was deeper, the blizzards wilder and the air colder. Those were the days of real outdoors people who knew how to tough it out. Of course, the kids by necessity were much tougher then, too. They had to walk three miles to school through four feet of snow, uphill in both directions. 

To be honest, I liked the nostalgia. I was drawn to those caricatures. They gave me a baseline for what the outdoors was supposed to be. Perhaps it was because I grew up reading, and then raised my own kids reading, the outdoor humor stories of the late great Patrick McManus, whose stories featured either kids (like Crazy Eddie Muldoon or the author’s version of his younger self) growing up in those bygone days learning to camp and fish, or older folks (like Rancid Crabtree or the author’s older version of himself) looking back on — and talking about — those days.

Then I woke up one morning and looked in the mirror and discovered I had become the old person. I walk out into my living room where my Christmas tree stands in a corner, and I find little people running around. I look closely and see that they aren’t my friends from school, nor even my kids and their friends; they’re my grandkids. Along with the sense of relief that I won’t have to pay for their college education or teach them to drive, is the delightful realization that I could now be the old character in the stories. 

Except at the same time, I also realized with horror just how much the baseline of expectations of weather (and the nostalgic stories we tell about it as we sit around the tree at Christmas) has changed as our ever-warming climate has propelled itself into, and a quarter of the way through, this new century.

It was only 20 years ago that my son Mark as a young teenager decided to be the first youth at the Nordic ski center at Blueberry Hill to complete 250 kilometers of skiing on their trails in a single season. He wanted to progress through all 10 rounds of incentive prizes (offered for every 25 kms completed), earning not only a pin and a hat and a box of their famous chocolate chip cookies, but the free pair of (used) skis for doing the whole challenge. In order to meet that goal, my wife or I had to take him up once or twice a week all season, and put in a lot of 20 to 30 km weeks. From late December through early February, that meant a lot of days in sub-zero temps. I remember one week — a school vacation week — when we were able to get out skiing several times, and it turned out to be 15 below zero the entire week. That was a year of skiing with facemasks and scarves. 

The thing is, those temps felt pretty normal back in those “old days” of two decades ago. It wasn’t that long prior to that, in the winter of 1990, that temps hit 30 below at our house. I remember reading of a thermometer reading of 45 below at the old Crown Point Bridge. That was our measure of “butt cold.” Whereas a mere -15 in January seemed ordinary. 

Last year, at our house in Bristol, we had a couple mornings where the outdoor temp tipped down and touched zero. We never got below that. We haven’t hit 15 below in a few years. 

Now if I’m to be honest, I’ll admit that as an older cross-country skier I’ve gotten soft. Although I enjoyed skiing with my kids, I don’t look back with any fondness on the sub-zero temps with the facemasks and multiple layers of scarfs. I enjoy skiing when it’s sunny and 25. 

But then I walk my woods and I look at my trees. I’m not old enough to remember the years when elms and American chestnuts were abundant in North American forests. But I remember fondly less than 30 years ago when we had a modest population of productive butternuts around our house. They were the first to go. Now their fallen trunks sit like bleached skeletons along our forest floor, with but a single living and sickly specimen left at the bottom of our hill. Next to go were the beeches, which began succumbing to blight about 15 years ago. The ashes are following, thanks to the emerald ash borer that has moved into the area thanks to the warmer climate. 

Now I worry about our hemlocks. They may be our favorite trees on our property. But the hemlock wooly adelgid has hit Vermont and is slowly but inexorably making its way north. The only thing to slow it or knock it back a few years is cold. The exact temperature needed to have a high mortality rate of adelgids varies from study to study. Temps of 30 below seem to do a good job killing off nearly all of them. I’ve also read that prolonged periods of 15 below can knock them back. But we get so little of that now. Winter temperatures are warming faster in New England than most places in the world. 

In the Champlain Valley, where the baseline has changed so much in just the first quarter of this century, you need to find some nostalgic old person like me to remember those days of 15 to 30 below zero. So when the temperature drops below zero — which to my delight it has done at our house twice this winter already — I don’t complain. I think of the ash trees that still survive on our property, and of the thriving stands of hemlocks. And when I’m up at the Rikert Outdoor Center skiing in the glorious snow conditions we’ve had this week, enjoying them before the 50-degree rain that is predicted to be falling the day this paper hits mailboxes, and I ski through one of the beautiful groves up hemlocks in the Ripton hills, I pause and admire them. And I hope that my grandkids won’t be forced to listen to my stories of the old days when Vermont still had hemlocks. And I think about how I can lower my carbon footprint a little more.