I’ve been having a gargantuan desire to see the snow. Lisa and the kids and I haven’t been up to the cabin when there was any significant amount of white on the ground since May of last year. And that was more of a grayish brown by that late in the season. I get this same feeling every year during the fall and start of winter. But why?

Frequently I am able to relate my behaviors to those of early man. The shudder that I felt when we were at the zoo last summer and the lion roared was related to early man’s fear of predatory animals. The shudder that I felt was telling me, “You’re about to get eaten…RUN!” I knew that I was safely on the other side of a one inch thick glass pane, yet some Darwinian law of hominid leftovers was making the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

But what is the Darwinian law that says, “You’d better get back up the hill to the snow or you’re not going to get any skiing in and you’re going to die!”? Many years ago as I learned about Darwin’s theory of evolution at Sacramento City College I quizzed my anthropology professor several times about one aspect of it. I never felt that I got a solid answer from him as to why, for instance, mankind is evolving toward having less hair.

Thag: Who’s the guy with the hairy arms?

Thog: I don’t know, but you should see the sweater factory on his back.

Thag: That’s a shame. He’ll never live long enough to have kids.

One could argue that when early men began to build shelters (and forgive me if my knowledge from my minor in Anthropology escapes me) he no longer needed the hair on his back, legs and forearms to protect him from the sun. Therefore, humankind began to evolve toward a state of less…hairyness, if you will. Those sleek-skinned folk were somehow more likely to produce offspring thus passing on their “hairless” jean to their offspring. We dropped the “monobrow” and the first fashion magazines were born.

Meanwhile, the hair on my back should–if my physics is correct–actually help to keep me warm on those long chairs at Sugar Bowl. So if anything, I appear to be more evolved than those fashion mag cue balls and I’m just gonna’ quit shaving my back so I can head up that hill in comfort (at least in the winter.) And who cares why I have the desire to see the snow every fall? For now, I have the means to quench that desire, and that’s what I think I’ll do.