January is a hard month in Utah. That’s when The Inversions come. The time when the world loses all its color and turns gray and filthy and indistinct. When the horizon seems to shrivel down and attach itself to buildings and trees and lampposts, like leathery skin with no flesh beneath it adhering to the bones of an ancient, starving man. In January, when The Inversions come, the world becomes small and hard… and very, very cold.

The Inversions. No, they’re not ethereal, soul-sucking monsters straight out of a Harry Potter novel, but they’re pretty damn close in my estimation. I used to tolerate them fairly well. But that was BD, before diagnosis. Things are different now, and January is much harder for me than it used to be. But I’ll get to that.

For my out-of-state readers who may be wondering what in the hell I’m on about today, I ought to explain that “the Inversions” — formally known as temperature inversions — are an annual phenomenon brought on by a quirk of the local climate and geography where I live. Essentially what happens is that, during the winter months, the air near the ground becomes stagnant and cools off, while the air higher up in the atmosphere remains warm, which is of course the opposite of how things are normally. Normally, wind currents would mix the two temperature zones up, but remember that the bottom layer is stagnant; there are no winds to speak of during this time of year, much like the doldrums sailors experience near the Equator. And so the cold air stays in place for days or even weeks at a stretch. And it gets very, very cold during these periods… damn cold.  As in “your taun-taun will freeze before you reach the outer marker” cold.

But wait, it gets worse.

Utah is a vast place, but believe it or not, most of it is uninhabited. Some 80% of this state’s population is crowded into a narrow strip of land called the Wasatch Front, which runs roughly 80 miles from Brigham City on the northern end to Santaquin in the south, with the state’s three largest cities — Salt Lake, Ogden and Provo — and their sprawling suburbs right in the middle. The Front is bounded on two sides by mountain ranges, so all these cities essentially lay at the bottom of a gigantic bowl. (Well, it’s shaped more like a trough, but the bowl image is a bit more illustrative for my purposes here.) Now picture this bowl filled with over two million people who are all driving cars and consuming electricity and trying to stay warm. Naturally, these activities all generate air pollution. And that layer of warm air up in the sky during an inversion is like a lid sitting on top the bowl, holding down not only the temperature, but also all that airborne pollution generated inside the bowl. Exhaust from cars and powerplants, smoke from fireplaces, god knows what from refineries and smelters and factories… it all lingers here in the valley during an inversion, growing more and more concentrated day by day until a storm front finally comes through and the savior winds punch a hole in that giant invisible Tupperware seal and drive all the frigid, mucky air away.

The Inversions have been a fact of life around here as long as I can remember, but they’ve been especially bad this year. An article in the Salt Lake Tribune last week noted that four of the five places with the worst current air quality in the entire country are right here in Utah, and three of those four locations are along the Wasatch Front. Doctors are warning of increasing danger to even healthy adults, in addition to the elderly and children they’re usually concerned about, and there’s a growing chorus of voices demanding that our politicians do something about it. But I don’t need newspapers to tell me what I see with my own eyes every time I look out the windows at work. From my offices on the 13th Floor, the Wasatch Mountains on the east side of the valley ought to appear close enough to touch. But for the past week, the mountains have been utterly invisible behind a grey scrim, and even the spires of Salt Lake’s Cathedral of the Madeleine, only a couple blocks away from my building, are mere shadows in the mist.

As worrisome as it is to be breathing filth, though, it’s really the cold that’s troubling me. It never used to, particularly. Oh, I didn’t like the cold, but I tolerated it quite well. I remember a time when I felt perfectly comfortable wearing only a t-shirt and a leather jacket. No more, though. I mentioned a while back that something has changed in my body over the past year and I no longer “run hot” the way I used to; I don’t know if it’s something to do with diabetes, a side effect of the medications I’m taking, or the result of losing a lot of weight and/or lowering my blood pressure. Whatever it is, these days I’m wearing long johns, layered shirts, and a cardigan underneath a goose-down parka, and I still feel chilly. Even when I’m indoors. Granted, it probably doesn’t help that my desk at work is located in a bump-out that sticks out the side of the building and is surrounded on three sides by glass; I would guess all those windows radiate heat into the cold air outside pretty efficiently, making it difficult to keep my area warm. Or it could just be my own perception. But whatever the explanation, I notice the cold settling over me as I sit at my desk, flowing across my arms and the tops of my thighs, and sinking into my fingers so the joints stiffen up and begin to ache. Lately I’ve been imagining myself as the unfortunate chap in the image above… immobilized beneath a rime of frost, waiting for a spring that seems as if it’s never going to come.

I hate it. I hate every miserable moment of it, feeling like I’ve grown weaker in some fundamental way, even though I’m in fact healthier than I was a year ago at this same time.

I finally understand why my dad has long fantasized about going to Hawaii during the winter months. I’ve been dreaming lately about heading south myself… along with all the other senior citizens who wear their sweaters year-round. And I hate that too. For someone who’s been fretting about getting old for a long time anyhow, this new development does not help the ego…