Groundhogs, Badgers, and Bears, Oh My!

Have you ever wondered about the origins of Groundhog Day? How could a rodent make us believe it can predict the weather, inspire grand celebrations, and bring us one of the best Bill Murray movies of all time?

Going back centuries, we find part of its beginnings in European weather lore. Except they believed a hibernating bear was the creature to look to for a prediction. Now imagine what it would be like if America had adopted a bear instead of a groundhog as their meteorologist. Bear Day? Bill Murray certainly wouldn't be driving around in a truck with one.

Groundhog Day also bears similarities to the ancient Pagan celebration of Imbolc. It is a time for feasting and celebrating the lengthening of days. They looked to badgers and serpents for their weather predictions. Badger Day or Serpent Day? Nope, honey badger doesn't want anything to do with that.

While the U.S. adopted Groundhog Day in 1887, Alaska celebrates Marmot Day because they have very few groundhogs in the state. Yes, those ground squirrels are cute, but Marmot Day doesn't have quite the same ring as Groundhog Day.

In a time of satellites and radar, many people still look to animals to predict our weather. No matter how far we've come technologically, we're still a superstitious lot. Even when the groundhog is right less than half the time, especially in recent years.

Don't go making plans based on how the half-awake animals behave. Instead, spend today watching Groundhog Day over and over and over and over again. It will be a better use of your time.

Summertime and the living is easy?

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With all due respect to the writers of the above famous lyric, I beg to differ.

I hate summer. I hate heat, I hate the blazing sun, and, most of all, I hate humidity. It's safe to say summer is not my season. I know that puts me in a small minority. Possibly of one?

Nothing about me is conducive to enjoying summer. My skin is so pale that I could easily pass for a corpse, and tanning is not something it is capable of. The only color my skin can turn is lobster red. I have thick, curly hair that hates humidity as much as I do. Five minutes outside in July and my carefully coiffed curls are transformed into a frizzy clown wig. Even my feet hate summer, as nearly every pair of sandals I have ever owned has given me blisters.

While most people look forward to the standard summer attire of shorts and tees, I cringe with embarrassment at the thought of exposing my blinding white legs. I loathe leaving work and getting into my car when it has been roasting in the parking lot all day. The inventor of air conditioning is one of my personal heroes.

One of the few things I like about summer is baseball, yet this year my Reds are so pitiful that they have merely increased my seasonal grumpiness.

My hatred of summer played a big role in the development of my latest novel, Polar Day. After writing my debut novel Polar Night around the winter solstice and the Arctic phenomenon of 24 hour darkness, I became interested in writing a sequel about the opposite extreme. When reading about summer in the book's setting of Fairbanks, Alaska, I was horrified at the thought of a sun which never has the decency to set. When I read about an extraordinary summer heatwave that was baking Fairbanks, it was easy to imagine the primary horror facing the people of my story. What else could it be but fire?

Fortunately, unlike the people of my book, I've never had to face the terror of being burned alive. The only burning I've had to deal with is from the sun. But I still count the days until I can say goodbye to summer.

October is far and away my favorite month of the year. I love the cool, crisp air and I love being able to cover my ghostly pale limbs with jeans and hoodies. I love football, the shorter days, snuggling under a toasty blanket, and hearing the leaves crunch under my feet when I take my dog for a walk. In short, I love everything about autumn.

To quote Green Day and wrap this up with another lyric, this one much more suited to my personality, "wake me up when September ends."

All Aboard for The Turnagain Arm

The Turnagain Arm on Kindle

The neighborhood where I live is situated along the Ohio River, directly up a very steep hill that ends at the train tracks that run along the riverbank. On clear mornings and nights, we can hear the whistles of the trains as they make their way along the river. I've always found the whistles eerie and for whatever reason the empty tracks have always been a bit creepy to me. An old abandoned train station used to sit along the tracks and when I was a kid I always imagined all kinds of scary things going on in that deserted station and on the tracks behind it. It seemed to me that station probably had lots of tales to tell.

I got the idea for my latest tale, The Turnagain Arm, after hearing a train whistle coming up from the river while I was walking my dog Clancy early in the morning. Later, I heard another whistle to end the day. It was fall and the night was crisp and chilly, and the whistle lingered in the air long after the train had moved past us. 

I wanted to write a story about what my Polar Night vampire Aleksei Nechayev was up to before the events of that book and after his human experiences as a Russian soldier in World War I. When I read that the Alaskan Railroad construction began in 1914 and reached its peak in 1917, the same year Aleksei became a vampire, my interest peaked. When I then learned that the Trans-Siberian railway from Aleksei's home of St. Petersburg to the far east town of Vladivostok was completed in 1916, I knew I had the beginnings of my story. Suddenly it became crystal clear how Aleksei left the ravages of World War I in the Russian West for a new start in Alaska, as freighters regularly went from Vladivostok to the Western United States and to the Alaskan territory. Like the day that gave me this idea, the story begins and ends with the haunting whistle of a train. 

While researching the time period and the area, I found this great video put out by the Alaska Film Archives showing early footage of the rail's construction, which started in a tent camp that is now the city of Anchorage. 

There are also great historical photos of the early days of the railroad camps, such as this picture of two women who ran their own waffle house. I was so intrigued by the thought of two women running their own business in those days that I created a character who ran a waffle stand of her own.

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About thirty miles south of Anchorage was the most difficult stretch of the railroad's construction, the area known as the Turnagain Arm. The tracks had to be constructed at the base of steep vertical cliffs that ended in the body of water that gave the area its name.

This is what the tracks at Turnagain look like in the present day, so it's impossible to imagine how difficult and dangerous it must have been to construct them back in the 19-teens.

Source: alaskarails.org

This photo from the Alaska Digital Archives gives some idea of the conditions the rail workers were working under.

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I loved the idea of setting my story in such a hostile and forbidding place. The characters who live and work in the Turnagain Arm camp are a hearty and tough lot by necessity, but they also find time to relax and enjoy themselves in the Turnagain Arm saloon.

Unfortunately for them, the vampire named Aleksei Nechayev finds himself drawn to the saloon as well. And the workers who call the camp home soon learn that the brutal conditions of the Alaskan wilderness are nothing compared to the danger they face now.

Want to take a trip to The Turnagain Arm? Find the novella on Amazon Kindle and on Goodreads