The Discontent of My Winter

It’s been 37 years since I lived in the land of six-month winters, and yet each time I head out to get the paper when temps have dipped into the 20s, I get at least a fleeting case of weather-induced PTSD. I lived in the Upper Midwest for almost eight years, so my frostbite bona fides are as solid as the late January ice on most if not all of Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes. I am, however, much happier when it’s warm, and after years of close and intense study, I believe I can point to the absence of cold as the primary cause of my seasonally elevated joy.

If you live anywhere in the oft-frozen flatlands of the Upper Midwest, the weather can dominate major aspects of your life, like conversation and freedom of movement, from Halloween through March and often into April, especially in the smaller towns where I lived and worked, honing my sports journalism craft. After four years of this madness, I had decided that my craft involved working too many nights and weekends but was too lazy to look for daylight work, and so I was relatively happy in 1986 when the Des Moines Register was sold to Gannett, thereby getting me laid off from my craft and convincing me to move back to the warmth of the mid-Atlantic.     

I have wiped many of the worst weather-related horrors from my memory, but some were too traumatic to fully expunge. Like the time I left the Des Moines Register newsroom one cold and rainy March evening, and as soon as me and my bound-for-Fort-Dodge-four-car caravan hit the highway the rain had turned to snow and a near-total white-out. I spent three white-knuckle hours driving 15 miles per hour, straining to see the tail lights of the car in front of me as cars spun off the road from and to every direction, till we reached, not our planned destination, but somebody’s parents’ house, where we were all even more thrilled to be than our hosts were to have us. Or the Friday nights I’d leave Owatonna, Minnesota, after putting the sports pages of the People’s Press to bed at say 1 am, and drive 3 ½ hours west into the face of a wind that got its start on the eastern slopes of the Rockies, and became downright nasty on its 1,000-mile journey to my radiator. I remember taking a thick slab of cardboard and covering the grille of whatever one-winter hunk of automotive uselessness I was driving, then slamming the hood down to keep it in place and give the radiator a fighting chance of providing warm air for the trip, which was a thing people did that in retrospect seems both sensible and insane. Oh the things we did in our 20s to get laid.  

I moved around a lot back then, and pretty much always chose apartments based on the quality of their heat. There was no way to avoid being cold outside, but I was damn sure not going to be cold inside, though this was not a tenet shared by a lot of Midwesterners, who are made of sterner, or maybe sterno-er—like inside they’re solid fuel—stuff. So I was chilly indoors a lot, just not in my house.

I remember going to parties at one friend’s house and tossing bottles of beer into the backyard snow to chill, with an annual bash every spring when the snow melted enough to reveal the several cases we hadn’t yet discovered. That seems normal. Also buying warm beer (cheaper) and putting it outside for a few minutes, but not too many minutes, or it would most assuredly freeze, and sometimes we weren’t just drinking but engaging in other activities that could cause one to forget about the outside beer. See? Also normal. And how about this: you discover that if it’s going to get colder than 10 degrees below zero overnight, which it does on way too many occasions, your car won’t start in the morning, so you set an alarm for say 4:30 so you can go out and run the car for 10 minutes so it’ll start when you wake from your absurdly interrupted night’s sleep. Sorry, that’s normal too. That was one of the simultaneous joys and sorrows of life that far north: Everyone you know and like is going through it too, so it all seems relatively normal.

I’m not proud of the following admission: In my life, I have abandoned two, possibly three small cars in southern and central Minnesota snowbanks. But don’t judge me unless you’ve been there, like in late March when, after a disgustingly snowy winter, you get a foot of wet, cement-like snow, and you can’t face any more shoveling, but you have to get to work because god forbid it’s a Wednesday, which is when the league bowling scores get printed, and according to your boss that’s the only way some people get their names in the paper, and apparently that is subsequently the only reason some people buy the paper, so you rock your 14-year-old Subaru out of its snowy prison, ramming it back and forth between drive and reverse, knowing that in the process you are finishing off its already severely compromised transmission. But the fact is that shoveling snow kills hundreds of people every year because it’s way more stressful on the old ticker than it initially seems, and so some older folks attack it with unreasonable fury in the vain hope of getting it done quickly, and all they wind up doing is getting themselves done quickly, yet another reminder that one should not fuck with Mother Nature. I almost passed out once while literally shoveling furiously, and I was 25 at the time.  

I know and love people who love cold and snow, and while I admire them, I do not seek to gain admission to their club. I’m certain skiing is as much fun as it appears, but it does involve three things I just don’t like: waiting in line, being cold, and dangling high above ground while perilously exposed to the elements with the bonus possibility of falling. Skis did not grace my graceless feet until I was 50, and that is not a chronology I or any responsible national ski federation would recommend. I took a one-hour lesson and fell down more times in that hour than I had the previous 40 years of my life. The instructor kept telling me to press down with my big toes, and I remember thinking, “I’m wearing an enormous and seemingly impenetrable boot on each foot; my individual toes cannot, nor should they be called upon to be instrumental to the success of this endeavor.” That was my one and only downhill effort. I tried cross country, but that too consistently robbed me of my ability to remain in my preferred upright and locked position.

I tolerate DC winters because they are eminently tolerable, and because most of the people who like me enough to listen to me bitch about them live nearby. If I could get a solid contingent of people I like to come to Florida with me for the winter I would, but that seems impractical, starting with the fact that my partner of three decades refuses to set foot in the land of DeSantis and Disney. I’m willing to throw my politics out the window if it means I can roll the window down because it’s 75 out in January, and it did just dawn on me that red equals warmth as well as Republican, while blue stands for Democrat, but also cold. Still, I’ve found that most people in Florida are 1) from somewhere else, and some of those places are more enlightened, and 2) really only want to talk about their dogs, boats, or the weather, and so if you just avoid people wearing unpleasant life philosophies on their T-shirts, you’ll be fine. If you want to go, but think it would be against your better judgment, I would advise you to not check out floridaman.com, despite it being as reliably hysterical as Florida is reliably warm. And to be fair, Florida has in no way cornered the market on crazy as 2024 nears; that’s one of our few persistent national growth industries.

So to recap, I don’t love winter. For a while I lived in places where winter could kill you, but I don’t anymore, and winters where I live now aren’t nearly severe enough to get too terribly upset about. Then again, I don’t really see the point.