Whenever Old Man Winter rears his ugly head here in Portland, I like to hearken back to my frozen childhood in northern Minnesota for old weather stories. I understand why Portland natives who don’t often see snow, ice, and/or cold weather may experience varying degrees of panic when the forecast turns frigid, but the hysteria can be rather humorous from my perspective. I grew up going to school when -20F before you even begin thinking about “wind chill” was the norm. By that yard stick, a forecast calling for temperatures at or slightly below freezing seems…well, kind of a nonevent, really. Portland isn’t exactly well prepared for wintry weather, mostly because it’s a comparatively rare event…but inclement weather is always cause for much consternation. All four local news channels launch into almost orgasmic coverage in the drive to outdo one another. To someone who grew up in what could only charitably be called a frozen wasteland, ice and/or 3”-6” of snow isn’t the sort of thing that would excite a veteran of far too many Alberta Clippers.
One of the things I love doing is telling “war stories” of my time in the Great White North. My favorite is from when I was perhaps 10 or 11, when the air temperature dropped to -54F. It was so cold that even the antifreeze in cars froze solid. Block heaters helped, but only if your car was near an electrical outlet. Turning the ignition key in our family’s Ford Fairlane station wageon resulted in only a barely audible click. It was so could the engine wouldn’t even turn over.
If you’ve never experienced that sort of extreme cold (and why would you want to?), it’s a difficult thing to explain. The world becomes a different place at -54F. Sound doesn’t travel well, so the world is muffled, like a towel placed over a telephone receiver. Because everything- and I do mean EVERYTHING- is frozen solid, walking sounds almost like treading on broken glass. If there’s no wind, and there generally isn’t when the air temperature is so low, the sensation of cold becomes dangerously deceptive. After a few minutes of acclimatization, it almost doesn’t even feel cold, so the temptation becomes to take off scarves, gloves, and hats…which is about the worst thing you can do. At -54F, frostbite and hypothermia are never far away.
For reasons that escape me today, my father decided we needed to do some grocery shopping that day. Since our car wouldn’t start, we walked the 1/3 of a mile or so down to the grocery store with a toboggan in tow. The reason this sticks in my memory is that one of the things we purchased was a gallon of milk in a wax paper carton…which froze solid on the way home. THAT’S how cold it was that day.
I don’t miss winters in northern Minnesota, but they’ve left me with some interesting memories. They’ve also give me an interesting perspective on what passes for a winter storm here in the Pacific Northwest. I’m by no means a fan of cold, wet, and/or snowy conditions…but my car always starts and I don’t have to deal with snow drifts. I no longer even own a snow shovel…and wind chill is generally a very abstract concept. When winter does make an appearance, the snow sticks around for maybe 3-4 days, long enough to make everything pretty…and then it melts and goes away.
Pardon me if I don’t get all caught up in the hoopla and the hand-wringing over what turned out to be much ado about nothing, but I’ve seen far worse far more often than I care to remember.
