Cold and heat

The "home heating season" at our house began last Friday, when Olga and I noticed as we ate our bagels at breakfast that we could actually see our breath. Heating oil prices being what they are, this is not a step taken lightly, but we have a lot going against us at our new place. It faces west, so it only gets a few hours of sunlight at the end of the day, and just to the east of us is a stand of huge fir and maple trees that cast a nice shade in the summer, but ensure we live in darkness and cave-like chill. We think a lot about the absurdity of all this. In Russia, no middle class family sits in their own home wrapped in blankets watching their breath turn to frost. And none of them risk bankrupting themselves to pay for heating fuel either. The old joke goes that in Russia your thermostat is you window: you open it to let the extra heat out. One of the positive legacies of socialism are home utilities. In most cities, every district has its own cogeneration plant that pipes steaming hot water to each apartment for heating and hot water service. It is massively inefficient, though it isn't an urgent public policy priority because Russia has the resources, and as with almost everything, the situation is dramatically different in the provinces. Half of the Siberian city of Kransoyarsk was without heat or hot water for several weeks last winter because one of their plants blew up. All that is very bad, but when I first heard this coming winter in New England referred to as a potential "frozen Katrina" -- with ordinary people freezing to death in their homes because they can't afford to heat themselves -- I began to wonder. Sure, the Russian way is built on faulty assumptions about its sustainability and disregards society's most vulnerable members, but isn't it the same here? Isn't our dependence on oil furnaces and getting by with paltry insulation a reflection of the mistaken belief that heating oil would always be cheap and abundant? and isn't LIHEAP such a pressing political issue around here because there are way too many people who are broken by the costs of heating? It seems like another subtle reminder that the way things are done here in the States isn't perfect. It also points out one of the most common and absurd stereotypes I've encountered here, in which people respond to our year in Moscow by joking that it must've been cold. Well, actually, no. America is cold. Every place I went in Russia was heated abundantly and comfortably, and when you go outside, you dress for it. Hats, gloves, scarves, thermal underwear. Russians know that you don't screw around with winter, and as a result, it isn't that bad. Compare this with here, where winter is a long slog of dull, low-level misery. Of wet and chills and once the holidays are over, a kind of sunlight-free existential despair. It is no wonder that so many northern retirees cite simply avoiding the winter as the reason they pulled up roots and moved South.