As Nomads Who Follow the Spring, We Miss the Snow. But We Also Really Hate the Cold.

Life's full of hard choices, innit?

For the audio version of this article, read by the author, go here.

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As nomads, Brent and I are very lucky in one specific way: unlike most people, we can choose our climate. And if the weather gets too hot or too cold, we can easily move on.

And we do. Since we both hate the cold, we usually follow the spring.

Unfortunately, we both also love the snow.

You can’t have both, and in the last nine years of our travels, we’ve seen almost none of the white stuff.

Fun in the sun! Keyword: “sun.”

I grew up in Colorado, so it feels like snow runs through my blood.

Which makes it sound like I have ice in my veins, but you know what I mean.

Some of my best childhood memories are of building snowmen and snow forts, and going for nighttime walks while snow silently fell around me.

But my favorite snow-related memory came when I was a bit older. Colorado is famous for its skiing, and I once rode a chairlift up a silent mountainside alone — the only skier in sight. The landscape was blanketed in white, the tips of pine trees just poking up, as if cautiously checking whether the storm had passed.

The word “magical” is badly overused, but it applies here.

Photo by Geoffrey Arduini on Unsplash

Brent grew up in Puget Sound, where snow was much rarer — but that just made it more precious, he says. When it fell, it turned shrubs and mailboxes into sculptures of white.

And every Christmas vacation, he took the train from Seattle to Northern Idaho to ski with his cousins, so he also knows the incredible beauty of the mountains in winter.

Some of our favorite shared memories of our old life in Seattle are walking around Green Lake — an urban lake near our house — after a snowfall. The busy city would fall completely still, and late at night, we would sometimes have the park to ourselves. The following morning, the neighborhood kids would all turn out to enjoy the wonderland.

Even now, few things excite me more than looking out a window to see the first few flakes twirling down from a sky pregnant with the promise of more snow.

In our nine years of travel, we have sometimes visited colder climates in December, in hopes of experiencing a White Christmas: Vienna in 2021, to see the Christmas markets, and London in 2022.

But both times, snow didn’t fall — despite London being downright freezing. The closest we got to snow that year was a hard frost — the meteorological equivalent of getting to first base.

And about as satisfying.

This makes our English “White Christmas” look more enchanting than it was.

Our years of nomading have offered one glorious “snow” exception.

In October 2020, in the thick of the Covid pandemic, we rented a place in Helena, Montana.

A week later, a surprise blizzard dumped nearly two feet of snow on the city. Drifts in our neighborhood were easily twice that.

We didn’t have proper winter clothes, but we didn’t care. With midnight approaching and the storm still raging, we tucked our jeans into socks and headed out into the blizzard wearing fairly light jackets and tennis shoes.

The streets had disappeared, and the sidewalks were knee-deep snowdrifts, but we explored our transformed neighborhood. The nearby church looked even more gothic than before, and we soon found a red-and-green Victorian house that we christened the “Christmas House,” because it looked straight out of a Hallmark Christmas movie.

We stayed out for hours, warmed by our excitement.

The following day, despite temperatures well below freezing, we took a long walk to the edge of the city and beyond — into the frozen woods.

In retrospect, this was even more stupid than our being out in the snow late at night, because once the sun dipped behind the trees, our hands and toes froze too, and we were still several miles from home.

But it was so beautiful, it was absolutely worth it.

Fortunately, we survived, and the whole “Helena snow” experience turned out to be wonderfully unforgettable.

And it was unforgettable, in part, because it was a gift we hadn’t had to earn. We’d gone straight from a lovely fall to a deep winter storm.

And a few weeks later, after the snow melted, we flew down to sunny Mexico for the rest of the winter.

That blizzard was a cheat on our part — one of the many ways nomading is kind of unnatural.

It was a cheat because enjoying snow means accepting everything that comes with it: the icy streets and the long, cold winters. Most of the time, you need to prepare for snow: wrapping your pipes, winterizing your car, and stacking wood for the fire. And when it finally falls, you need to bundle up to go out and shovel the driveway and sidewalks.

Simply going outside requires planning, layers, and resolve.

To be clear, we did suffer some in Helena — those frozen fingers and toes. But that was due to our own stupidity. Frankly, we deserved it.

I hope we choose to experience snow again. I think we love it too much not to.

But it will come at a cost. Switzerland and Montreal aren’t cheap, especially for short-term visits. And trips to more remote areas, like Brașov in Eastern Europe or Northern Norway, require a fair bit of effort.

And there’s always the chance it might not snow.

Right now, we’re back in the United States for a month, at our part-time condo in Port Townsend, on the Olympic Peninsula.

And it could snow here in the days ahead.

We really hope it does. If you’re listening, Mother Nature, hear our prayer and let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

On the other hand, in a couple of weeks, we’re catching a cruise to Hawaii, so please don’t snow us in so badly that we get stuck here and can’t make the boat.

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Michael Jensen is a novelist and editor. For a newsletter with more of my photos, visit me at www.MichaelJensen.com.