The Aerie

Tunnel, no light

So here we are, in the heart of winter. January 20th. If winter is a toilet, January 20th is the bottom of the U-bend in the water trap.

Now, officially we're only one month into three months of winter. But like everything else in this modern, hurry-up world of ours, winter actually starts well before the start of winter. Well, usually.

When I was a lad, wearing an onion on my belt, that being the fashion at the time, winter started in November. I remember riding the school bus home in a raging snowstorm on November 11th during my first year in Minnesota. "Okay," I thought to myself, trying to get a feel for this insane new world to which my parents had consigned us: "11/11 - first major snowfall, check." By Thanksgiving the ice on the lake was thick enough to walk on, and lasted until Easter.

Everyone in Minnesota remembers the Hallowe'en blizzard of 1991, which was faithfully followed by the Thanksgiving blizzard, so as to leave no holiday unsnowed. But most folks don't recall that In 1985 it snowed on September 26th, the day I bought my '83 Mazda 626. That was just wrong, but there it was, winter trying to rush itself again. Soon we'd be building snowmen in August.

So by some measures we're already four months into winter in Minnesota.

But of course, winters haven't been the same, lately. Global warming is causing the winters to get completely wimpy here in the north country. (And, yes, I realize that it's not politically correct to say that global warming exists, much less actually causes anything. That's why I said it that way.) It used to be that winter in Minnesota built character, and separated the men from the boys (we had none of these newfangled 'women' back then, it was just men). Mid-January to mid-February was the worst, and being Minnesotans we celebrated the worst by throwing a carnival out in the snow. I memorized the fact that -40 Fahrenheit and -40 Centigrade were the same temperature because I lived in it, and it was useful for calibrating one's thermometers.

On January 18, 1994, I took the bus to the U of M to work, only to find the doors locked. Locked! That complete pansy, Governor Arne Carlson, had ordered all schools closed due to "extreme cold." I remember thinking, "Extreme? It's only 28 degrees below zero!" I'd weathered worse while living in Bethel, Minnesota after our move from New Jersey.

I recall shoveling out our 70-foot driveway by hand in order that we fulfill my mother's insistence that we go to church, only to have the station wagon clear the tree-line and embed itself atop and within a mighty snow drift that towered over the road. Hitting a drift at 45 MPH drives the snow right up around the engine block, where it freezes into a humongous ice cube. It was at least 100 below zero that day.

But those were storms of the past. Lately the winters are wimpy. No snow, no cold - it's going to be 30 F today instead of 28 below zero. January in the heart of winter is just an endless succession of gray, sunless days of damp humidity - hell, it's almost as if my family DID relocate to England. It's so grim and disheartening, and spring seems like such a distant dream, that one waxes nostalgic for real weather, real storms, real cold.

So we slog on, relentlessly plodding from one day to the next, waiting for the other shoe to drop, weather-wise, some bitterly-cold Arctic blast driving a howling blizzard that makes us appreciate the luxury of warm gray cloudiness.

And meanwhile we try to remain sane long enough to see the tulips pushing up out of the mud one more time.

Posted by Albatross at January 20, 2006 8:05 AM | TrackBack