Some cold weather thoughts ~ January 20, 1993

David Heiller 

Cold is relative. It always takes a cold snap to remind me of that. In December of 1977, we had a stretch of very cold weather, 20 and 30 below for a week or so. I remember standing outside and playing my banjo when the temperature rose to zero.

This past Sunday morning was like that. I shoveled snow in my bathrobe and slippers, after the temperature shot up to 17 below zero. That was the warmest it had been for a day and a half.

On Saturday afternoon, the thermometer rose to 21 below.

Cold~cold~cold

That was the high for the day. The night before we had minus 33.

Steve Popowitz went outside Saturday morning. He thought some people were chopping down trees in his woods. Then he realized that the trees were popping from the cold. Pop. Crack. Pop. Crack. It sounded just like someone chopping trees with an axe. It was louder and faster than he’d ever heard.

He had 35 below. He was trying not to boast when he said it. But it feels good anytime you can beat a friend in the How-Cold-Was-It contest.

There’s always someone who had it colder too. “Ed Pepin had 38 below, so we had at least 40,” Pat Helfman told me on Sunday. She’s telling the truth, as any fifth grade student can tell you.

Sure as shooting, someone is reading this column right now and saying, “Well I had it colder than that. Forty below? That’s nothing. Hey Lena, listen to what this idiot Heiller wrote this week.”

People love cold weather. It makes us feel like we’ve earned the right to be called Minnesotans.

Cold~cold days are good puzzle days...

We don’t brag about it, but it feels good to casually mention it. It’s the same feeling a fisherman gets when he’s carrying an eight pound lake trout, and he meets another fisherman. “Catch anything,” the one will ask. “Nothing much,” the other says, holding up his fish and trying not to smile.

Some people really earn their cold weather wings. I saw Pat Mee filling up Jean Lunde’s fuel oil tank on Friday afternoon. He was standing with his back to a vicious north wind. The wind chill was 50-below, which he acknowledged by turning up the collar on his coveralls. You know it’s cold when Pat turns up his collar.

Somehow, seeing Pat there gave me a secure feeling. He has an important job to do, and he does it, and you know he will do it. When was the last time you heard of someone running out of fuel because a Pat Mee or a Don Petersen couldn’t stand the cold? I can’t recall one.

...and a good time for a game of Monopoly with a friend.

School bus drivers earn it too. We trust them with our kids in the dark, frozen mornings, and they never let us down.

In fact, once people get accustomed to cold weather, life goes on almost as usual. Maybe they play a few more games of cribbage or Yahtzee. But people are still out snowmobiling and ice fishing. Kids still go sliding and skating.

I took an hour’s hike through the woods on snowshoes on Saturday afternoon. It was 21 below, but the sun was shining and there was no wind, and it was lovely. The woods were beautiful, pure and pristine. The snow was soft and powdery. Hardly any tracks on it.

I heard a chickadee call its spring song too. Phee-bee. Phee-bee. They must know something that we don’t.

Or else they are eternal optimists, like Steve Popowitz. He was going to split wood on Saturday afternoon. He had some big, tough hunks. They would split easier in the cold weather, he said.

Steve was verifying that old saying, that wood heats you six times: when you cut it, haul it, split it, stack it, carry it in, and burn it.

“Anything colder than 20 below feels the same anyway,” Steve said. Cold weather brings out the philosopher in Steve. (So do a lot of other subjects.)

I thought about that statement later, when I came in from the woods. My beard was white with ice. My toes were numb. As I warmed up I got a headache like you get when you eat an ice cream cone too fast. I don’t think I could have hiked like that at 30 below or 40 below.

It’s something to think about anyway. Cold weather is good for that.