Welcome! I'm Sara Ramsey, a novelist and former tech worker. I recently moved back to my 430-person town in rural Iowa after two decades in San Francisco. I write about the wild and weird magic of my rural life, as well as anything else that strikes my fancy. Thank you for joining me!
In Iowa, it’s the season for idling vehicles.
I forgot about this season when I lived in San Francisco. The City never freezes… and if I had left an unlocked car idling anywhere from the Embarcadero to Ocean Beach, it would have been stolen in seconds.
But when the temperature drops below twenty in rural Iowa, vehicles idle everywhere. People run errands and leave their pickups running in parking lots, or leave their tractors running in feedlots — all unlocked and unattended. My dad tells me of one particularly bad winter, circa 1982, when he left a propane hauler running for three weeks straight so it would be ready if someone needed emergency fuel.
Sometimes a truck will idle near my house overnight, taking advantage of one of the few spots in town where it’s possible to park a semi. One recent idler was especially noisy — an old semi attached to a large wagon, running until dawn outside my bedroom. Its rumble was barely concealed by the white noise I played to drown it out. The reverberations of the engine rolled in waves through my pillow and across my cheek, killing the vibe that my rainy forest playlist tried to create.
But even if rainy forest had worked, I still would have woken up to idle season.
I haven’t written a newsletter since the weather turned, which I’m a little ashamed of after a year of consistent posts. I haven’t done much of anything, really. I slipped into idle season the way I slip into a bag of Doritos — indulgent at first, then grubby and depressed.
The first proper snowstorm of 2024 reminded me: my body still perceives enforced idleness as a threat. When I opened the blinds to that first heavy snowfall, it was the early days of the pandemic all over again. I felt myself shut down. The world outside ceased. All I knew was that I couldn’t control the environment and also couldn’t escape it.
Even as it happened, I observed how quickly I reverted to my 2020 patterns. My thoughts slipped away, replaced by an urge to get comfortable and control what I could. I couldn’t concentrate, so I made a vat of beef stew. Then I made farmer’s cheese, setting milk to ferment next to a heating vent and hoping I wouldn’t poison myself. I used the final product for syrniki — Ukrainian cheese pancakes — which I slathered in blackberry preserves and sour cream. I read a few cozy mysteries while my cheese curdled (note: highly recommend The Thursday Murder Club). I pretended I was fine.
Then I ran out of enthusiasm for experimentation, sat on the couch, and doomscrolled for days. I’m sure some teenage TikTokers could explain my trauma responses if I wanted to get my mental health advice from kids wearing crop tops and cargo pants. But I left those clothes in the ’90s and have no urge to seek them out again.
After the worst of my weather-induced anxiety died down, I remembered that idle seasons existed long before engines stole the word “idle.” People dependent on weather usually have periods of relative idleness, whether it’s due to heat, snow, monsoons, or simply the end of harvest. We’ve done our best to engineer idle seasons away and pretend they’re no longer necessary, but they still happen in places we ignore or find unfixable.
Sure, natural disasters still happen. But in cities, our garden-variety weather events have had all the rough edges sanded off. I almost never lost power in San Francisco or Denver; the worst weather impacts I dealt with were depression after too many foggy days in a row.
As we made the world safer, we somehow lost the plot. We didn’t turn all that safety into room for play. Instead, it feels like no one ever can or should be idle again. The safety of the indoor world allows 24/7 productivity for the laptop class, which demands 24/7 availability from the Instacart class that feeds them.
There is, though, a limit to what science can solve for. Rural Iowa is one of those edge cases, where technology’s usual paths toward efficient scaling can’t cover a handful of people spread across too much land.
Here’s one practical limit: diesel turns to gel when it’s too cold. Additives and engine block heaters lower the freezing point, but if the temperature drops below zero and you don’t have a garage, you’re out of luck. That’s why there are so many idling trucks around town — if they run on diesel, they have to stay warm. Once they’re shut off, they’ll freeze up until the next break in the weather.
The last couple of weeks were absolutely brutal. 16+ inches of snow and 40mph wind gusts made roads impassable. The wind scoured the fields, leaving some spots bare and depositing feet of snow elsewhere. For four days straight, the temperature stayed below zero. The windchills were -30 to -50 degrees. At those extremes, exposed skin freezes in minutes. And the trucks, tractors, and plows needed to move snow — or take feed to snowed-in livestock — won’t start with frozen fuel.
My parents live a mile from me, but in this weather it might as well be a thousand. Eight hundred miles of gravel roads criss-cross the county, and the local government can only afford a handful of snowplows to care for them. I live near a main paved road and get plowed regularly (sadly, this is not a double entendre), but my parents’ road was impassable for days. My dad has heavy equipment to clear their driveway, which can take a couple of hours even with a tractor — but he can’t clear a path to town. In an emergency, the sheriff’s office might find someone with a snowmobile to get them out, but otherwise they have to wait for a plow to clear their road.
Even with my road mostly clear, I didn’t try to drive through the drifts in my driveway. One of my dad’s pickups sat outside my house for a few days, its fuel filter frozen, its engine refusing to start. I was closer to escape than my parents were, but all I could do was wait for warmer weather and let myself idle until the thaw.
As I watched the snow fall, I examined my idleness. It’s no secret that I was burned out when I moved back to Iowa. I think I’ve mostly recovered. My shoulders aren’t always hunched up around my ears, and my heart rate is ten beats per minute lower than it was in my last tech job. I am delighted by quieter days and space to create.
But I’m prone to relapse. So much of my past has trained me to view idleness as a threat. A threat to income, or status, or social ties; definitely a threat to a self-image created in a world defined by output. So it’s ironic, in an Alanis Morissette kind of way (i.e. probably not the right definition of ‘ironic’), that pandemics and blizzards have deeply reinforced my subconscious belief that idleness happens in conjunction with life-threatening events.
And that’s the way it feels, isn’t it? Periods of idleness in modern America usually happen with illness, layoffs, loss. There isn’t a playbook for adult idleness that is expansive, creative, happy.
Does it have to be that way, though? After all, an engine doesn’t idle because it’s dying, and it doesn’t die because it’s idling. It idles so it can stay warm and ready to move again.
A local woman named Luree used to say that the first snow date of the year will predict the number of snows we’ll get before spring. Our first snow was December 26th, which indicates twenty-six snows this season. If Luree is right, that’s twenty-six moments to idle through.
In my old world, that felt like twenty-six forced, anxious pauses hindering my to-do lists.
But in this post-burnout world that I’m exploring, maybe it’s twenty-six chances to warm up — and twenty-six chances to let myself embrace whatever movement comes next.
I will say, though, that I hope Luree is wrong about the snow. I could use some practice with idling, but I would rather try it in the sun.
Cheers,
Sara
Thanks for reading! If you have thoughts on idle season, I would love to hear them - please leave a comment or get in touch at dearsara@sararamsey.com.
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The pagan religions teach that winter is a season of rest and rejuvenation, a time to hibernate and sleep longer so that the body and mind are ready for the new cycle when spring comes.
This is so true! Wisconsin went through the same but not nearly as longs. But 13 inches of snow and 4 days of cold temps was just too much. I am loving the 40 degree days but we need to see the sun!