Open your window and see

Author: Lynne Zummo '06

Two years ago, I cursed my wet jeans. The rolled up cuffs were soaked, dripping with water, cutting into my calves and filling me with a hate for life so strong that focusing on physics Professor Rich Wolfson's mad chalkboard scribblings was hardly an option. It was December of my sophomore year, and thick sheets of rain were pummeling every building, sidewalk and wormhole in the state of Vermont. It was December, 45 degrees and torrential downpour, and Professor Wolfson was spewing out parts per million, constants, equations, climate models, ice cores and everything else that we have to tell us that what we have been doing to our planet has forever changed its atmospheric system. There I was, abhorring every sopping cotton fiber on my body and aching to ring the necks of all disciples of the SUV faith, every oil kingpin and every nay-sayer who deemed global warming a myth of the liberal conspiracy, all while scratching away at a soggy notebook. They should climb down from their earth-eating vehicles, I thought, and try trudging across campus in this alleged winter. They should sit through an hour of physics chaffed by rain-soaked denim.

I first learned about global climate change in eighth grade science class. Mr. Sonne, a middle-aged man consumed in a battle against male pattern baldness, mentioned something of greenhouses and oil and cows, but I was 13 and preoccupied with surviving junior high. It was not until four years ago, when I first saw the Tetons in late November, bald and dry, that I first understood global climate change. The year before I came to Middlebury I had flown west with new tele-skis and a fantasized notion of jagged Rocky Mountains peaks frosted with snow, but found the mountains wearing nothing more than a sere crust of mud for the first sickly weeks of winter. When I returned home in January, Connecticut's snow had already melted into spring. Every trek through the backyard was a muddy battle that reinforced the idiocy of my ski purchase.

But that was just the start, for now I know climate change-the warm days, the heavy rains, the sudden melts-like I know the fat campus squirrels, neither one because I particularly want to, but both because they are here. Both, because they are here, and are as much a part of Vermont as the maples that crawl up the crumbling Green Mountains, and as much a part of my life as geology textbooks and senior seminars.

I grew to know climate change well last year, when my final December days at Middlebury were soaked and humid, and when drumming rain tapped as the background of Christmas Eve Mass. And then a little bit better when I coughed my way through the streets of China, vendors with smoking coals on either side of the narrow asphalt strip clogged with rumbling cars, speeding to a future of industry and progress.

But this year, this is the year in which I have come to know climate change the best. Not only did the rain fall on Christmas, but on New Year's, too, and then on and off again throughout this strange season. I went rock climbing in the dead of January, on a 50-degree day when it should have been bitter cold instead of melty spring. The warm, dry rock was inviting and fun, but deep down I wished it coated thick with ice. I wanted to hate the day, to curse the nice weather, to damn the carbon dioxide. I wanted winter back.

Two weeks later, from the hooded cave of my rain jacket, I watched a drenching rainstorm batter a defeated looking tent city. January's Get Outside Week, my frozen brainchild, was drowning in mud. Winter felt lost.

Another week after that, winter returned. It snowed, and a friend and I taught our annual snow shelter class. A week later, our quinzee had shrunk to a dirty lump of slush on Battell Beach, a muddy tumor on a stagnant plain of water.

There is more.

I wore shorts for one February morning run.

My Sorrels have seen more mud than snow.

My nordic skis have made better house decorations than functional sports equipment.

Although there is snow on the ground today, winter still feels lost. To those who deem climate change a lie, a mad environmentalist extension of the truth, I encourage you to open your eyes. Forget the papers for now-the media, the politics, the campaigns. Instead, look outside. Feel the thaw. Touch the mud. Talk to skiers and maple farmers. Ask Bread Loaf how many days they have opened their trails this year. Walk across campus in a winter rainstorm, and then sit through class with wet pants. Wake up and open your window. Our world is changing.