So You Think Its Cold Here?

Really 300xSo, you think it’s been cold here in Tennessee? Let me tell you about cold. I married a North Dakota girl. Don’t even try replicating that feat. There were only three when I got mine, one of the two left is chased by the nearly twenty-six North Dakota men more than Sasquatch has been chased, and the other resembles Sasquatch. You’re out of luck. And for the record, when I mention the cold associated with my marriage, I am not talking about the look I get when I leave socks on the floor or the fact that her feet can be subzero while everything ankle up is toasty warm. No, I mean I’ve been to the tundra and have lived to tell the tale.

I was a young man, newly married, and on my way to visit the in-laws. (In case you’re wondering, ladies, the men reading this just cringed, shook their heads in pity, and muttered, “That’s not gonna end well.”) It was January and the entire Midwest looked like an endless white sheet from my plane window. During a layover in Minneapolis, I squeezed my eyes tight and prayed as the bus to the mall skidded over enough snow to shut down East Tennessee for a month and cause a bread shortage of colossal scale. Trust me when I say you, my dear Southern friend, would have been a milkless shut in as I dreamed of being at that moment. That’s when I realized that something about the weather above the Mason-Dixon Line drives people insane.

Happy to be alive and confused at the concept of deicing a plane in five below temperature, I continued my journey to Bismarck, the capital of nowhere in the state of holy-crap-it’s-cold-out-here. I did this with a firm grip on the airplane seat, staring out the window in search of the inevitable icing that necessitated the deicing. Luckily, we beat that clock and set down in Bismarck on what I have to assume was a runway because it was the same white as everything else in sight.

Did I mention the temperature at this point? No? Well I say this with a hero’s bravado because I survived. It was twenty-seven degrees below zero. That is cold enough to make a polar bear shiver. At that temperature, a well digger’s hind end is the equivalent of a propane space heater. The moisture in my nose froze instantaneously. I can tell you from alarming experience you have not experienced cold until you fear for your life because a nasal icicle could pierce your brain.

Have I mentioned the wind chill? My wife says it was something like sixty below, but I am sure it was much worse. Perhaps sixty below the point human skin will shatter. Perhaps sixty below the point blood freezes inside a still beating human heart. I promise at one point I saw two ice cubes light a fire to get warm. We are talking about too cold for Eskimo inhabitation, yet nearly seventy or eighty people live in that state. It was insane.

Crime? Are you kidding? Who’s warm enough for that? Recreation? Possibly, but difficult and life threatening. The golf course winters as a cross country skiing trail in case a cross country skiing Tibetan yak ever visits and wants to risk it. There is one hill in the town with one tree at the bottom perfect for sledding. It had a warming house at the top to help prevent frostbite, which seems to originate in North Dakota, and certain frozen death. My wife’s eyelashes had icicles hanging from them. (Not an exaggeration.) At one point, my glove fell off and I noticed my frozen hand was still inside. (Only a slight exaggeration.)

So, if you think you’re cold now here in Tennessee, move to North Dakota. You’ll be going against the relocation gradient, experiencing true cold on a level only arctic foxes usually experience, and nearly doubling their population at the same time.

Source: David Swann