The first chapter of Calvin Rutstrum's Paradise Below Zero is a paean to the healthful and enjoyable aspects of winter. The rest of the book discusses winter travel and campng techniques, and I mostly recommend it highly. (The "mostly" indicates my dissatisfaction with some of his less-than-PC pronouncements on a few subjects.) Here's a taste from the first chapter:
Along the various arctic coasts, the first major snowfall produces a sense of exhilaration in every Eskimo village -- a jubilation that strikes young and adult alike. This, we may be sure, is no mere caprice of mood prompted by the effects of weather. For the Eskimo, snow foretells a major change in his mode of living -- a sudden heightening of seasonal interest, the beginning of travel by dog sled or motorized toboggan, the visiting of remote villages and outlying trading posts.
Increased mobility obviously does not provide the only advantages to the seasonal change. The very essentials of snow and ice themselves brighten the life of the Eskimo and expand his scope.
When we compare the Eskimo's response to winter in the arctic with the despairing attitude in metropolitan and rural areas of the Temperate Zone toward approaching winter, perhaps we need to examine rather critically the reaction to weather in general as it underlies our own overall mode of life.
. . .
Unfortunately, just about every aspect of urban existence is negative toward the advantages of winter. Superheated home, office, and factory require clothing adaptable to the indoors, with little conversion-facility to cold and snow. . . . And since the urban population lives in homes that are essentially machines , and their travel is primarily in machines, a snowstorm -- natural and magnificent as it can be -- instead of becoming an interesting phenomenon to enjoy, tends to foul up the mechanized order of life, until season after season, city life, maladjusted to winter, sags into a kind of chronic discontent.
Man has largely been fighting the natural elements instead of adjusting to them since he first wandered away form nature's indispensable benefits. . . . He is not likely to exercise vigorously indoors, and if he does, under indoor winter conditions of extremely low humidity and unbalanced oxygenation, the exercise is of questionable benefit, if not harmful -- at best a tragic and needless substitute for the refreshing outdoor life available to him by a few simple rules of daily application.
