THE CRACK
words and photography by jacob zocherman
What can you do when it surrounds you?
Bears retreat from it, hibernating as if to sleep off the endless weight, taking a colossal power nap.
Most of nature slows down, conserving what it can to survive the darkness and the cold.
But humans?
We don’t slow down.
We never do.
In today’s relentless society, the wheels keep turning, even when the quicksilver in the thermometer plummets and the sun barely
brushes the horizon before
disappearing again.
We all know that cold, damp darkness—our own, others’,
and the one looming outside the kitchen window.
Days when the sun, hidden behind clouds for weeks, rises late and sets soon after lunch.
Mornings when the chill sinks so deeply into your bones that a freezer might feel warm by comparison.
Some people drink to escape it.
Others slip into winter depression.
Many hold tightly to secret dreams of spring, of the time when light returns, and all will be forgiven.
We find ways to endure because, without them, we wouldn’t last.
In Växjö, a small Swedish city, some face the darkness differently.
Every December, they gather in a tent larger than a football field, circling a track less than 400 meters long.
It’s called PRT—a competition with races lasting 6, 12, and 24 hours, along with a grueling 100-kilometer challenge.
There’s no single word to capture it.
Perhaps it’s best described as a kind of last exit to elsewhere.
It embodies Leonard Cohen’s haunting words from Anthem:
‘I can't run no more’
‘Ring the bells that still can ring’
‘Forget your perfect offering’
‘There is a crack, a crack in everything’
‘That's how the light gets in.’
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