Community Spirit Column April 2013
As spring rolls around we get anxious to get at it. But truth is, winter is fairly popular around here and most of the folks don’t get too upset by the lingering of the deep frost and snow.
In these parts there is a genuine pleasure in the cold, a noticeable attitude of embracing the winter weather. It is also not uncommon to hear the ever-present desire to use the winter cold to discourage the “riffraff” from moving to this quiet place---and to kill the ticks of summer. Here, folks just move ahead with smiles and a content pleasure of loving our 44th parallel.
There are skiers and snowshoers who have glorious opportunities traveling through frozen trails. The Ice fishermen, who with all their new-age contraptions, reside comfortably on the frozen lakes waiting for that one big one. Interestingly, there are individuals with their plow-adorned pickups that revel in pushing snow and snow-mobilers, who clad in colors of the race, zip about at all hours of the day and night. Around here the cold of the winter is just seldom scoffed----that is until spring is close at hand.
It is true last year disrupted us when spring somehow managed to arrive in February and then went ballistic in March. While this only happened in this one year, now we start thinking it will be a pattern and we start adjusting our thinking to accommodate the new system. The maple sugar crowd cleaned their gear, even a few tapped trees and stacked wood to get ready for their first boil in mid-March, but no. It is still cold, and that includes a touch of nighttime sub-zero.
While the winter is full of ice and snow, it isn’t until spring is lurking that we get frazzled when we slip and slide. The suspicion is, we are just getting tired of it, even though the winter itself feels like it just started. The time by the fire and the time to read is now almost past. Just like that, there it was, gone.
I heard one avid skier starting to complain, “Here I was thinking to put up my skis when it goes cold and the snow falls. So I says to myself, Well, spring would be nice, but hey, I’ll go skiing because soon it will be warm and then I will be bitching because there is no skiing. I’m going for it”.
Well, spring is a time of rebirth, a time to move on, to grow a few things and I really didn’t like falling on my butt this winter, so in a weak moment, I complained to my kid that I was through with winter. I hadn’t caught that many fish, and my knee hurt, and one of my snowshoes was busted.
“Oh please,” I thought knowing he had just returned from a three week adventure on snow machines into the Brooks Range----camping. He was too full of himself as he glamorized the beauty of the untouched land, the icefalls, the expanses of snow and last but not least, the cold temperatures that challenge every living thing, and that includes those snow machines.
About halfway through his descriptive dissertation, it occurred to me that possibly he was the wrong person to bare my growing concerns of the late spring and the two feet of snow. In great glee he then tells me, “Man, you won’t believe this, but do you know that stupid fiddle song you do, called, “The Night the Whiskey Froze”? Well, ours froze. So cool.” Then rather than listening to me and my dribbling mutterings on the unexpected weather, he went on, “We found the eaten remains of a Caribou right in the trail, and the icefalls up on the river were unbelievable, and we ran out of fuel and had to go into a Native village to buy some for ten bucks a gallon, then the pull start broke. Let me tell you, fixing that at twenty-five below was no fun. Man, what a time.”
About then his mother was wracked in what she calls retro-fear (fear after the fact) and we abruptly quit complaining of the cold. We just reminded ourselves how beautiful the weather and snow have really been this winter----and so warm. (Whiskey freezes at minus 34)
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