Advertisement We had plans made, but those plans were 70 miles over the ridgetop and across the plain, and Uncle Sam’s official weatherman was using the B-word, telling everybody who was home to stay home. So, I stayed home.
Time was when we wouldn’t have been so well behaved. A few flakes and a little breeze wouldn’t have gotten between me and wherever it was I wanted to go. I was a Minnesotan. I laughed at winter.
I’m still a Minnesotan — but it’s been a long time since I was 16 with a freshly minted driver’s license and way more testosterone than common sense. Nowadays, I let the four-wheel Rambos mutter “wuss,” to their heart’s content — I know what it’s like to drive through the middle of a marshmallow. It’s one of those potentially life-shortening experiences I’d just as soon not repeat.
From what was being forecast Sunday, there was a repeat performance in store for anybody who dared nose a bumper out into open country. Snow, cold, wind — just what’s needed to make road, ditch, sky and cornfield indistinguishable to the eye, but not to the tire and undercarriage.
I could hear Bobby Fuller in the rising moan of the wind, “I fought the law and the law won,” all too aware there’s no Miranda warning when the laws of physics are broken.
Choosing between an afternoon and evening in my living room and in the middle of a wind-swept highway median seemed to be a no-brainer — unless the median featured central heat, flush toilets, a kettle of homemade bean soup simmering on a back burner and a shelf of good books waiting to be read.
I did feel a bit guilty, pulling on my slippers and nudging the thermostat up a couple degrees. It really wasn’t all that bad out. The fur stayed on the dog when I took her out, so the wind wasn’t that vicious and the street was clearly visible from the porch window.
But with houses, trees, fences and tool sheds chock-a-block on top of each other it’s hard for the wind to get hold of enough snow and carry it far enough to build a proper prairie drift.
Getting snowed-in in the city pretty much requires the assistance of the city snowplow tossing the snow from the alternate side behind, beneath, atop and ahead of your properly parked vehicle or heaped in a shoulder-high windrow across your clean-shoveled drive.
Not so out in the countryside, where our Sunday plans would have taken us. Out there, a snowflake is a marvelously mobile thing … moving from drift to drift with each shift of the breeze; gleefully gathering with its fellows to block and reblock the same stretch of county highway or crushed-rock road three, four, five, six times before it settles down to wait for spring as part of an icy roadside rampart, towering higher than hood or stock rack, ready to catch the next errant breeze and flying flake.
Out in the country, living where we did, we didn’t have to watch the morning TV to know if there’d be a snow day — if the district superintendent didn’t agree with our call, he had a standing invitation to come shovel out the half-mile of windblown gravel so the bus could make it to end of the driveway. It was an offer we were never taken up on.
Not that it would have made a great difference if it had. A passing plow on our township road was an event to be taken note of, as a clear path to the wide world beyond the farmyard was a thing not to be taken for granted. The icy spume barely settled in its wake before we were on the way to town, bound on buying whatever might be for sale before the family down the road got there and bought it before us.
It’s easy, living in a town that has more than one place selling food, to forget that when the sole grocer in town runs out of bread, the whole town eats cake. In a bad week in a bad winter, I went in looking for hamburger, buns and ketchup and came out with sardines, crackers and kraut. It was hard to eat well when your road was plowed last.
Not so on Sunday.
It was seven blocks to the Kwik Trip, but there was nothing I needed to buy. Most of the snow was staying put and the city was showing no urgency in plowing what little did fall.
I ladled up some soup and laughed at winter.
I’m a Minnesotan, after all.
Jerome Christenson is columnist and online editor for the Winona Daily News.
