Editorial of January 30, 2025
Talking Back to the Winter Doldrums
They are upon us again. Those dark, gloomy, cold, cloudy, lonely, empty days, wherein pretty much nothing happens. Indeed, we have suffered through the lightless winter solstice, managed to put away the glitzy holiday season, and figured out what we need from the January white sales. And now we have—the winter doldrums. It’s a curiously long way to spring.
The word doldrums emerged from the very difficult sailing area around the equator known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone, where winds are light or nonexistent and a sailboat, no matter how big or small, can be stuck there for a long time, its crew running out of food and water, and forced to endure inactivity, boredom, and the resulting depression. This quite large area of the Atlantic, which is centered around the Sargasso Sea (a weed-infested sea with no land borders), has been much glorified by the later term Bermuda Triangle, which has through the years endured many hurricanes, weather extremes including lengthy, depressing doldrums, and magnetic anomalies, which threaten successful navigation. Here, many a ship and airplane has disappeared, providing a feast for all manner of creative, mostly literary, explanations.
So, we are left with the doldrums. They can describe almost anything that’s in a slump, from economic doldrums to sports, to cultural and real estate doldrums, but the really offensive doldrums are simply those of winter, and this is where we are right now. We are in a slump, just waiting for the sun to shine, the daffodils to bloom and the birds to sing. It’s a perfect time for the Cooperstown Winter Carnival, instigated in 1967 to, in the beginning, provide a recreational and social diversion for the people of the village and to, as the carnival volunteers say, celebrate the whimsical, uplifting spirit of winter. It is also, brilliantly, a concrete harbinger of spring.
Our feisty little carnival is not the first of its kind (nor is it in its 57th year, as is stated; it is rather in its 58th, as it was founded in 1967 by the Cooperstown Ski Club and the Chamber of Commerce, and it’s on track for its 60th anniversary, which the powers that be say will be in 2027, a tad confusing). Carnivals—also known as winter festivals, snow festivals, and frost fairs—have been around since 695, when the Thames River froze for six weeks, and everyone took to the ice for food, games, and goods. The great Frost Fair of 1683-84 was claimed a Bacchanalian triumph, with two months of horse- and coach-racing, ice skating, puppet shows, bullbaiting, football, bowling, sledding and foxhunting, all out on the frozen river. By the early 19th century the climate had become milder, and the Thames stopped freezing over.
There are carnivals across the world, many, some small, for their own residents, and others larger and longer-lived. They are pretty much all run by volunteers, focused on the health benefits of the great outdoors, brimming with local camaraderie and organized to put an end to the deep winter doldrums.
The local, enthusiastic organizers of the Cooperstown Winter Carnival, under the auspices of the Cooperstown Lions Club, have scheduled all manner of outside activities to amuse and encourage us, and inside entertainment to keep us warm and happy. While it looks as if we are going to have a frozen Lake Otsego for this year’s carnival for the first time in several years, sled-dog and automobile races on the lake disappeared from the line-up some time ago, but we can go sledding at Lakefront Park, skating at Badger Park, make some really big snowmen, and finish off with a Blizzard Bash in Doubleday Field parking lot, complete with an insane Tesla light show. So come and eat, drink, shop, and play. The doldrums will disappear and spring will come.
