Wintry musings run hot and cold

Winter can evoke feelings of dread due to cold, snow and darkness.

While the Earth Holds Its Breath is one woman’s attempt to reframe that dread.

Helen Moat’s from Northern Ireland but was, until recently, a longtime resident of Derbyshire, a largely rural county in England’s East Midlands. Her previous book was A Time of Birds (2020), a bike-across-Europe travelogue.

Most of the book is spent on her wintertime explorations of Derbyshire. She artfully paints scenes of rolling hills, wooded glens and valleys, wild moorlands and the picturesque villages of her beloved Midlands county.

Her writing strikes a nice balance. She occasionally steers riskily toward lyrical, but never crashes into affected. And even her most meditative moments are grounded in the hard realities of landscape and weather.

But sometimes her accounts start to feel like similar journal entries — lucid, highly literate journal entries, but journal entries nonetheless. The repetitiveness of the geography and topography she doggedly traverses across three winters lends itself to a repetitiveness in her telling.

Nor is there anything novel about her prescription for beating winter blues — getting outside and challenging the weather on foot. Everyone from clinical psychologists to fitness experts touts outdoor exercise as an antidote to seasonal affective disorder (SAD), and even clinical depression.

Moreover, much of the book doesn’t travel well. The winter she confronts, from a Canadian perspective, isn’t all that daunting or long.

Her accounts of dull, dreary and rainy winter days in the low-lying central part of the county near where she lives — and where average January temperatures range from 2 C to 7 C, and any snow that falls melts as fast as it hits the ground — comes off as a bit namby-pamby to a Canadian. Even at higher elevations in the north, in the Peak District National Park where she and her husband like to hike, temperatures rarely fall below -5 C.

Even more milquetoasty-ish is the length of the winter she avowedly embraces. She discloses that spring flowers such as the crocus, which signal winter is on its way out, emerge as early as February.

She also travels to northern Finland (specifically Lapland) and Japan to gauge how other cultures react to winter and winter’s onset. Her object is to learn how and why some nations adopt a more engaged and buoyant stance to the cold and dark. And she’s admirably candid about her struggles, and failures, to import Lap and Japanese attitudes to an English Midlands winter.

Moat writes nicely detailed yet unhurried narratives of her domestic and foreign explorations of winter. But for a book like this to work, it must be both particular and universal in its appeal.

Her accounts of her English Midlands winter walks are a finely rendered particular. But they fail on the universal front.

Much of the season she describes, and for which she purports to provide a how-to guide to embrace, just doesn’t resonate with the Canuck experience of winter.

Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.