'Macho weather' arrives

I have to admit, I’ve been feeling pretty sorry for myself during the past couple of weeks — weather-wise, that is.

With the snow, freezing rain and icy roads followed by wind that sent trees flopping across electrical wires, rooftops and roads around the area, I felt as though Mother Nature was picking on all of us.

Then I had a phone conversation the other day with a brother-in-law who lives in Fairbanks, Alaska. He had heard about our travails with the weather gods, struggling to get to work and back and taking care of all of the holiday errands in the crummy climate. (Global warming? Bring it on!)

“Yeah, that’s tough stuff,” he said. “It’s hard to get around when it gets cold. It’s been pretty chilly here, too.”

As Ed McMahon would ask Johnny Carson, “How chilly was it?”

“Fifty below,” he said. As in five-zero. And that wasn’t the wind chill factor.
“It’s supposed to last through next week,” he said.

When I was in fifth grade we lived in Fairbanks for a year. It got down to 55 below zero, and I thought I was going to die. The only cars running were taxi cabs, which ran 24 hours a day. Our car, a 1963 Volkswagen camper van, was found in the parking lot with its wheels pointing heavenward. I think it was suicide.

I wasn’t taking it so well myself. We had moved there from Louisiana in November, and my system was in shock already. Add 55-below and you can imagine how a southern boy who had only seen snow a couple of times in his life must have felt.

Things happen at 50-below that you don’t think about in warmer weather. Pipes freeze, furnaces go on strike and cars just don’t work.

Even their tires would freeze with a flat spot where they had been on the ground. I still remember bumping along in a neighbor’s car.

And here’s the kicker. I walked to school in that weather. I often remind my kids of that fact when their mother asks me to give them a ride to school because of inclement weather such as rain or cold.

“Yeah, and it was uphill both ways,” they always chime in.

Later on, when we lived in Minnesota, I’d often get into conversations about the weather. In Minnesota, that’s a main topic of any conversation.

“So, is it colder here or in Alaska?” someone would inevitably ask.

I’d just laugh.

“Hey, when it gets below zero, it’s cold,” I’d say. “It really doesn’t matter if you’re in Minnesota or Hawaii.”

For years my favorite Minnesota radio personality was Steve Cannon, who was on WCCO-AM daily between 3 and 6 p.m. Everyone in the upper Midwest and much of Canada listened to him.
Of course, that’s an exaggeration, but not much.

Cannon had a term for when the thermometer hit 20-below and the wind chill plunged past 70-below.

He called it “macho weather.”

And was he ever right.