Some Like it Cold
There are six inches of new snow on the ground this morning and on Friday, we spent fifteen minutes getting the car out of the driveway. The trick is simple: use a shovel to clear a few inches in front of the drive wheels and then get inside the car and floor it back and forth, back and forth. Getting behind the car and pushing does no good if you driveway is packed ice as is ours, and you’ll be disappointed if you try to push a Corsica out by nudging it with a Corolla. The Corolla sometimes wedges below the Corsica and then gets stuck there.
And I think: This is flavor country.
The people on the news recently have been saying that it’s COLD outside. It’s COLD and it’s going to stay COLD, and that’s C-O-L-D, as in don’t count on sunbathing. You are aware, weatherpeople, that it’s winter? That this is Ohio?
Wussies.
The Simpsons the other night had a scroll running across the bottom of the screen to tell us all about a wind chill advisory. This was the second night in a row, and I have to wonder: When did cold wind in the middle of winter become newsworthy? The scroll said, “Areas will be gusty and cold. Dress warmly.” Duh. Most times, our yard is a tundra with bare grass in some places and vast S-shaped dunes in others. That night, we had just gone out to the barn to clean horse stalls, where the manure freezes as solid as billiard balls and will split along fault lines to reveal an interior that sparkles like a geode. You need to use a hammer to dig a hole through the ice in the horses’ water buckets, and when the ice gets to five inches or so you have to take the whole works into the house to thaw. And I’m thinking, Wind chill advisory?
The folks on the news, they’ve got Doppler Five Million X-220 SuperMachine StormTracker and they say: It’s cold. When I lived in Columbus, the weatherman had to stand behind a hi-tech-looking console and sound dire as he gave his forecasts. Up here, they do what all meteorologists do. They apologize for the weather. They promise to try to change it.
“I’m sorry Velma,” they might say, “but the HAL 9000 Super-Duper Weather MegaForecasting Droid says that this snow is going to hang around for another week or so.”
“Oh, Dave, that’s terrible news. Isn’t there anything you can do?”
“No promises, Velma,” Dave will say. “But we’ll try and get some clear skies in here for you by the end of the ten-day UltraProjection forecast.” Then he’ll chuckle.
When I was in school, I used to hate these people. The sky would be pregnant with snow and these fools would be talking about how the next few days were going to be rough, that we could only hope for the return of some warmth. I wanted a snow day. I wanted to rent a street sweeper and a Zamboni and follow the salt trucks on their rounds. But these people on the news were looking to go to the beach or something, and I felt like telling them:
Psst… It’s winter!
Robin hates the cold. I love it. And I don’t mean that I don’t mind the cold; I mean that I actually enjoy it. It’s hearty, somehow. You head outside in a coat that appears to double your mass and the wind and snow blow all around you and… yeah. Don’t get me wrong — I like warmth plenty. But not in winter. Warmth in winter, in Ohio, scares me. Warmth also makes me feel obligated. When it’s nice out, I feel guilty sitting inside. When it’s cold, I have no alternative. Drink coffee. Tea. Hot chocolate. Bailey’s Irish Cream. Read a book, by the fireplace if you have one. We don’t. But every winter, I read The Shining. For those of you who have spent the last two decades in a hole, The Shining is a Stephen King novel about a family snowbound at an old hotel in the Colorado Rockies. There is much creepiness and murder. Fun for everyone, really.
“Looks like we could get another three to five inches of snow by morning,” says the forecaster. Then he puts WeatherTrak in motion and zooms in for a street-by-street analysis by the Channel Five Extrapolatron 500. We can’t cure cancer or AIDS, but we can predict exactly how thick the ice will be at Euclid and Fifth, and even then I can flip a coin and have a better chance of getting it right.
Outside, I throw snowballs at our dog. He catches them and they explode, leaving him perplexed. The claw hammer we use to break the ice in the water buckets has slowly accumulated a frozen crust and now looks larger and rounded, like a ball peen. The vast pile of frozen horse manure beside the barn has become the Matterhorn.
The Channel Five scroll says, “Winter weather advisory. Cover exposed skin and limit exposure.”
And I think, Duh. Bring on the hot chocolate. Bring on the fire. In the book version of The Shining, Jack Torrence never once writes, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” but he does stick his hand into a wasp nest. So bring on the Overlook Hotel and let the wind howl outside. What is this, June? They say that if you can’t take the heat, you should get out of the kitchen. Well, this is Ohio. So I figure that the folks on Channel Five should maybe just take Quadruple Doppler XL1000 and step away from the icebox.