O my god, I need sun. Now.

The first year I lived here in Puddletown, the effect of the sunless winter was negligible. I had been warned about its ill effects, but after the bloodless and desperate winters I’d experienced in the Northeast, I figured the Willamette Valley would be a piece of cake. Last year, it was. This year, I’m ready to claw through the wall for some solar warmth. It’s like my fingers and toes never get completely warm. I feel like that nemesis of Superman’s who would curl up into a fetal position every time the sun went behind a cloud.

There was a Saturday Night Live gag commercial (they were always my favorite) where Chris Farley has a cold, and complains to his wife. She recommends the latest breakthrough in cold-fighting technology, Hibernol. She hands him a five-gallon bucket of this green stuff and he guzzles down. It’s supposed to cold cock you (damn that’s some fine-ass malt licker) all winter long, so by the time you woke up, not only was your cold gone, so was the winter.

I want that stuff so bad right now I can taste it.

Without ultra-violet radiation, I find myself less motivated than ever. “Not you, Scott! How could you be even LESS motivated than usual?!” you’re probably asking yourself. I haven’t brushed behind my bottom teeth for weeks. I had uncooked rice and a raw potato for dinner last night. I’m lucky if I can bring myself to wipe every OTHER time I go. It’s getting bad.

Most people don’t know that humans need the sun to survive. Sure, we need it to grow stuff and to tell time, and to charge that huge bank of hippie solar cells to gather enough energy to heat a cup of stick-tea, but exposure to sunlight on our skin allows our bodies to metabolize vitamin D, a very important nutrient. This nutrient is provided by many of the things we eat, and is also fortified in breads and dairy products, but without sunlight, vitamin D is not “bioavailable” (absorbable). Experiancing a vitamin D deficiency, a person can develop depression, psychosis and eventually psychotic dementia. The native Alaskans (Eskimos, Inuits, whatever you wanna call ‘em) describe a common occurrence called Pibloktok (pih-blok-tok). Because the winters are so harsh, and the long cycles of sunless days, occasionally someone would just simply lose their minds. These episodes would play out almost identically person to person, generation to generation. The individual in question would throw open the entrance to their tent, and begin running around the village like their ass was on fire, screaming like a banshee. They would then, in a fit of dementia, tear off all their oily seal-clothes and charge around, waving their hands and yelling. The really neat thing however, is that the villagers are supposed to completely ignore it, and pretend it’s not happening. The assumption is that some wily demon had possessed their fellow villager, and if we ignore it, it’ll just go away.

So, just a notice to all you non-Inuits, if you see me running down the street stark naked, screaming like little girl and waving my arms around, pretend I’m not there.

He walked onto the road at eleven A.M., on the first of April. He had three cans of soup, an extra pair of jeans, a tattered copy of The Old Man and the Sea and the Swiss Army knife his grandfather had given him on his twelfth birthday. He’d learned how to make a bow from the limb of a chicken tree, that day, but he and his brother could never perfect a single arrow. They would always careen off target by yards, no matter what kind of wood they’d used, now how they labored to straighten its shaft. This escapade made him doubt very much the stories he’d loved as a child, of hordes of Indian braves raining arrows upon the advancing cavalry.

He planned on walking, but planned on no particular destination. He remembered a scene from a movie he’d seen years ago, but with no whiskey pint close at hand, he snatched an empty Pepsi bottle from the side of the road, and spun it on that thin yellow line that marked the lanes, like a little girl’s sleepover game.

South is where it pointed. South, he thought. South sounds nice. As he took the first step towards the closest thing to a destination he’d had in years, he smiled and tucked his thumbs under the straps of his backpack. He thought about the photos he’d seen of the home in Key West where Ernest Hemingway lived with his army of six-toed cats. He thought about the plantation houses that Walker Percy wrote of, he thought of Camino Real and A Streetcar Named Desire.

Hemingway stuck with him, however. The sour-faced, bearded man that had seen war and death and true human putridity, and wrote words of beauty and faith and hope, even if they were thickly veiled with the dank of human malfeasance. Drinking Cuba Libras and fishing for marlin, much the old man himself, both in love and desperately afraid of the sea from which he’d made his life.

He never thought of himself as a hitchhiker, and never thought he’d bring himself to it, but as the Jeep Wrangler approached, he felt his thumb extending outward and a smile crossing his face as it slowed and stopped. The girl driving was no more than twenty-three, pretty and sandy-blonde. She asked if he needed a ride and giggled at the obviousness of the answer. He opened the canvas passenger door with the wrinkled plastic window, and threw his backpack in the rear seat as he settled into the dusty bucket seat. She yanked the Jeep into first gear and gunned the engine with a jolt, sending them careening down the warm country lane.

The marvelous thing is that’s it’s painless. The first words of The Snows of Kilimanjaro echoed in his head as he heard her speak. She never took her eyes off the road, she rather gazed at it intensely as she described her journey. She had asked his name, but never waited for the answer. She simply went off on a tear about her husband, her best friend, and the duffel bag next to his that comprised all of her worldly possessions. She spoke of sex and deceit, the way Hemingway would have, as if they were inseparable; two sides of a well-worn coin. She apologized and asked where he was going. As far as you’ll take me, he said. She looked in his eyes for the first time and smiled.