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Such references as I have at hand show no evidence that
the poet T.S. Eliot ever spent any time in the Rocky
Mountains. But I can't figure out any other reason why he
wrote that April is the cruelest month.
Income Tax Day is cruel to everyone, but the other horrors of this month may be peculiar to the high country.
This is the season when the promise of spring appears,
but that promise is Mother Nature's way of saying Your
check is in the mail.
You look foolish when you venture outdoors, because you're still wearing your winter coat, and there are other folks running around in T-shirts.
The only consolation is that on those days that start pleasantly, you'll feel smug because you wore that stifling coat. The sun will be shining and the birds chirping, but in only a moment a savage wind will roar down from the high peaks, and those underdressed idiots start feeling the pangs of frostbite.
Generally, the weather doesn't go sour that quickly. Most often, it's an overnight transition from greening grass in your front yard to a foot of snow on the sidewalk.
This season offers you a collection of the worst of everything that Colorado has to offer. Just by stepping outside, you can find yourself getting chilled by the wind and burned by the sun while under attack by swarms of noxious insects -- all at the same time.
Sometimes it will start to snow even as the sun shines. Not always is it snow. It can be frigid, needle-sharp rain, or clinging sleet, or bruising hail, or all four within a ten-minute span.
And you can be knee deep in mud when all this happens.
Indeed, mud may be the only consistent factor in the miserable April climate. It's everywhere. Turn off on an unpaved county road, and you're bogged to the axles. Try some city streets, and you can see just how hard this winter was on pavement as the omnipresent gumbo lurks at the bottom of fresh chuckholes, lurking down there to grab innocent vehicles as they go by.
Children sink in the yard, which had grass only moments earlier. Once they get free, they track it into the house.
It's no wonder that everyone up here calls this Mud
Season.
In the summer, you can hike, fish, and camp. Likewise for the fall, which also offers big-game hunting for people inclined that way. You can ski in the winter.
But what can you do in April?
Drink and carouse, perhaps, but many entertainment spots are closed this time of year. The owners, flush with ski-season profits, decamp to Mexico until Memorial Day, until the summer tourist season starts.
Going to Mexico for Mud Season is almost an established mountain ritual for people with money. They return in late May with fresh tans and sanity.
The rest of us get through the month on hope, which becomes more difficult all the time.
There is the hope that the weather will start staying clement on a regular basis, a hope that is always dashed by the arrival of an arctic cold front some afternoon.
Once the weather closes in, of course, you know why
travel
and travail
are words with the same
root. Those rows of peaks that rim your valley lose their
scenic value. You just stare at the towering barricade of
dismal gray granite and try not to remember that prison
walls are built out of precisely the same substance.
You begin to believe that winter will never, ever end. And this has been a winter of discontent, the worst winter that anyone I talk to can remember.
Stores that looked prosperous have closed their doors. Marriages that appeared stable last fall have produced bitter, vicious divorces, and no matter how much you try to stay out of the way, people keep trying to get you to take sides. People who were once pleasant have become surly, growling beasts.
And every day's gossip brings more bad tidings. Another acquaintance goes off the deep end into serious alcoholism, finally convinced that the mine will never open again. You see somebody's furniture in the street and an eviction notice on the door. You wonder when it's going to happen to you.
You start to understand why some of the old-timers are so dead set against change. Every time something changes, it's for the worse.
So far, summer has always arrived. But I can't escape an awful, ominous feeling that this year will be different.
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