JOHN PEPIN

Walking up the stairs to bed, I felt as old as the year.

Sometimes, everything I do feels like every other thing I do, like every other thing I do.

The days twirl and blend into each other like chocolate syrup swirls in a vanilla ice cream dessert, making the cold confection turn a pale brown color.

But it’s thick and tastes sweet and I’ll most likely be disappointed when it’s all gone.

The end of the year is here.

Like some forlorn ghost or scarecrow, I get reliably wistful about the time they start to play “Auld Lang Syne.”

It is something I have worked against for many years, but it arrives like clockwork, just as the grains of sand start to get scarce tumbling through the hourglass.

It’s as though every second of every minute of every hour of each day ticks down to — and is dependent upon — this one single night when one year magically disappears and another appears simultaneously.

The wistful part is thinking back over an even greater span of years to realize that if one event would have gone this way instead of that, or if I had been here instead of there, things likely would have worked out much differently.

How exactly? I couldn’t say.

This isn’t woulda, shoulda, coulda, it’s just the wondering exactly how things might have been different, good and bad.

It’s just strange how all these days and time and years and months work in intricate interrelated fashion somehow that even the smallest event is in some way connected to me, even if it’s simply that I experienced it along with millions or billions of others.

It’s complicated to consider this notion.

For some reason, it seems “disrespectful” somehow to not stop to take stock of the events that have occurred over the past year before moving on up to the next level, like graduating from one class level to the next in school.

It seems like I need to be able to try to figure out what I’ve learned or demonstrate what I know after the past 12 months before dashing off blindly into a whole new year.

But then this tends to lead to questions about what do I know for certain, what does anybody really know and why does it seem so critical to find out?

Strange though, as much as I feel a duty to look back, I really do not like the annual review news stories, the seemingly endless lists of top 10 things to do and not do in the new year, the resolutions, the roll call of all the great and talented people we’ve lost, and most of all, the damned countdown.

I wonder sometimes what we are really counting down to.

A review of my top ten potential answers to that question doesn’t really seem like anything to celebrate.

For example, without specifying a category, but just searching Amazon.com for “countdown to,” the list returned is mostly comprised of movies or books.

Here are the first five titles:

“Countdown to Zero.”

“Shockwave: Countdown to Disaster.”

“Countdown to Midnight,” a novel whose main character is a former U.S. Air Force officer “caught up in a shadow war against allied Russia and Iran – a duo wielding a terrifying new weapon.”

“Morning Show Mysteries: Countdown to Murder.”

“What Went Wrong: Countdown to Catastrophe.”

As I said, this is a process I’ve tried to ignore for many Decembers now, unsuccessfully.

I typically relive the experience, but to a somewhat lesser degree, a few months after the new year begins when my birthday rolls around.

For that reason alone, I can see why some folks stop celebrating birthdays or keeping track of how old they really are. I can also see why people might want to drink on New Year’s Eve.

But then, like life itself, the look back on the year just past and the new one yet to begin has a teeter-totter effect.

With the lows that smack the wooden plank you’re sitting on hard down to the ground, comes the counterbalance highs that send you up above the whole scene, able to seemingly transcend the bad days, the heartbreak and the disappointments to visualize a clear, sunshiny day off in the future somewhere.

It’s kind of like thinking back on the tremendous bomb cyclone winter blizzard we just experienced that someone on a national newscast described as “the Christmas gift that no one wanted.”

It was a “storm of the century” in parts of New York state, brought freezing temperatures to the deep south and dumped about a winter’s worth of snow within a couple days and shook outhouses here in the U.P., from Nisula to Naubinway.

On the other side of that powerful storm, the snow was incredibly beautiful to see glinting in the sunlight that shone on the flocked conifer trees on Christmas morning.

At my bird feeders, it looked like a winter scene greeting card or a picture artists paint, with breathtaking bright colors splashed everywhere all at once.

There were sharply marked blue jays, a glorious, red-bellied woodpecker and more than a dozen evening grosbeaks vying for feeding places with some winter bespeckled European starlings and white- and red-breasted nuthatches.

The storm, with its cold temperatures having put a decisive and icy head lock on most every inland lake, ice anglers came out of their homes and set up their pop-up shanties or dragged their more durable winter-long shacks out onto the ice.

The time to be outside and living is right here and right now.

Looking at the new year can be like our Christmas morning drive to the home of my in-laws for breakfast. I got up at 5 a.m. to blow enough snow out of the driveway to get on the road, which hadn’t yet been plowed.

My wife and I left the driveway not sure what we would face along the way, with the roads that were plowed slicked with ice, skies still dropping snow and the winds summoning up blustery, thick curtains and cobra-like snakes of blowing snow across the road in front of our Jeep.

On the highway, someone in the passing lane came as close as six inches away from striking our vehicle.

Whatever we had to face, however the conditions manifested themselves, we were determined to continue onward, moving forward.

We took longer than usual to get where we were going, but our reward was arriving safely at our woodland, country-home destination where we had a great time with more than a handful of relatives, many we hadn’t seen in quite some time.

So, ultimately, I arrive at the place each New Year’s Eve of gazing bravely into the new year determined to take things as they come — one moment, hour and day at a time — hoping for the best, trying to believe and visualize that good things will come in the days ahead.

Someone reading this might ask why I can’t just skip all the retrospection, the sentimental recollections, the quivering my internal divining rod and the withering soul searching to jump right to the feeling optimistic, with spirits lifting, my thoughts hopeful and my dreams in front of me where I can see them?

The answer to that question is “I just don’t know.”

I am aware that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but I can’t seem to make that work for the turning of a new year.

An irony to all of this is that “Auld Lang Signe” is one of my favorite songs of all time.

Thinking about it now, a bit prematurely, there were certainly many things to be thankful for during the past year and I hope to recount them all.

There were other things that happened that brought the leering cobras to bear, with their forked tongues and slithering, bobbing their deceptive heads back and forth, threatening to strike.

Like the snow snakes that blew up and coiled out there in front of us on that stormy highway on Christmas morning, I plan to leave them behind to sink back into the dirt and the ice-cold ground.

I will eventually, after my New Year’s ritual, await the sunshine, the love and the promise of a new year, cautiously optimistic.

Fly pretty bird, dive into the sky and show us all what you can do.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.