On Winter

Forget war and other people, to listen to the people of Minnesota, winter is hell. The French learnt it in 1812 when they invaded Russia, the Germans learnt it in 1941 when they invaded Russia, and Minnesotans let me know all about it from the moment I moved here, months ago,

Minnesotans have a proud tradition of hyperbolic apprehension about the onset of the winter, and whilst they love to emphasise their ability to overcome the obstacles that the treacherous weather will bring, they also want you to know that you will get frostbite and die should you ever step outdoors between November and May. This slightly schizophrenic traits of describing a terrible, all consuming threat whilst also acknowledging that it won't actually make that much of a difference to their day-to-day lives is essentially the opposite of England's approach to the inclement climate.

We, after all, will readily accept that our weather is probably best described as tepid. Our summer is lukewarm but rarely scorching, and our winter is best described as 'nippy'; a word containing all the threat of a teething toddler. The worst we're expecting to face is a day of sleet, followed by three days of ice on the pavement and a national decision to take an ever increasing series of snow-days. Ditching work to go sledging is helped by a transport system that's crippled by a brisk nor'easter, let alone an actual cold front. We're a nation moving around on trains that can't navigate the wrong kind of ice, cars that collapse under a blanket of snow and entire airports abandoned for fear of frost.

But we take a perverse pride in our inability to deal with an annual event, as though every time it somehow comes as a surprise to us that the seasons have changed. The fact that it only happens once each year seems to be enough of an excuse for us to greet every snowfall as an excuse to just surrender to the weather and not go take part in our actual life commitments.

Meanwhile, in Minnesota it snows a foot overnight and nobody even notices.

Wampa Cave, Hoth Minneapolis, MN

Jalyss sent me out to shovel the snow a few days ago, A shovel isn't the same as a spade, I've learnt. You have to scrape the pavement, shattering through the lower layers of permafrost in order to shift the snow above. It's deep, compact stuff, forming the kind of strata usually reserved only for geology. On the top is a fine powder of fresh snow which blows around in the constant gusts, creating an icy fog that drops the line-of-sight to a few hundred metres and freezes the hair on your beard.

A beard is essential in Minnesota. It's not just a hipster affectation (like my record player), but a facial necessity. It constantly astonishes me that women make it through the year, because the extra cover of coarse hair is sometimes the only thing that prevents my face from sloughing away and my entire jaw dropping off, like a sub-zero approximation of the Nazi's at the end of Raiders of the Lost Arc, with less melting and more straight up shattering. When I say that my beard freezes, that isn't hyperbole. In the time it took me to clear the drive, my beard solidified, and the really crazy thing is that I didn't even notice until I came back inside and the heat melted it down the front of my chest. You know you're acclimatising when you no longer feel the need to keep track of whether your facial hair is forming it's own snow cone.

All of this is observed by the locals to be the hallmarks of an exceptionally mild winter, and whilst it's true that I haven't pulled a Captain America and woken up totally encased in ice more than two or three times, I don't especially appreciate the assumption that it gets worse than a wind chill of -40. That's -40 F, by the way. In C, it's - 40. - 40 is the temperature at which temperature conversion apparently just gives up and stops bothering.. Frankly, I don't know how to deal with double digit temperatures in either scale. I didn't even know that temperatures went down like that in anything other than a theoretical way. Meanwhile, everyone here seems quite disappointed by how easy this winter has been, as though all their doom-saying and warnings have been in vain, and the inevitability of my awakening to the harsh reality of life here has been lessened. It's as if I'd gone out on the moors during a full moon and come back the next day without having been attacked by a werewolf, and everyone is bitterly aggrieved about it.

It's like I won't be truly accepted until I've lost at least three digits to frostbite. Fortunately, it's only January, so we still have four more months of Winter to go. So I'm just going outside, and may be some time.