Thoughts on (another) warm day in January

So, when’s it gonna get cold?

I know, we’ve had a fairly long spell of chilly … snow on the ground that’s stayed snowy a fortnight or better; ice on the lake thick enough to support a fat man searching for fish; late afternoons when kicking the thermostat up a couple of degrees really seemed like a good idea. Yeah, it’s been chilly … a week after Thanksgiving but a couple of weeks until Christmas chilly; wool hat and rabbit fur gloves chilly; misplaced Texan thinks it’s cold chilly … but here we are, hours shy of February and it ain’t been cold yet.

Minnesota cold, that is.

Ok, Winter’s not over yet and, truth be told, the coldest Minnesota morning on record didn’t come until the second day of February 25 years ago – 60 below just outside Tower. I had a friend up there who marked the occasion by driving a 10-penny nail into a fence post using a banana he’d left out overnight.

That, my friend, is serious Up Nort cold. I’m not sure we’re all up for weather that turns tropical fruit into impact tools. But even down here in the Miami of Minnesota we’ve a history of the kind of weather that had folks plugging in the family car decades before Elon Musk charged up the first Tesla.

Let’s face it. Cold is what makes Minnesota Minnesota. More so than hot dish, lotsa lakes and being persistently pleasant in the face of unceasing annoyance. People in less extreme climates don’t seek comfort in cream of mushroom soup or realize than an annoyed neighbor is unlikely to skip breakfast to jump start your Chevy so you can make it to work on a typical January morning. Twenty below gives perspective to life’s priorities and 20 below with a 40 mile an hour wind is a life-changing experience. Awareness of hypothermia is a great social leveler.

So far at least, this season’s thermia has been anything but hypo. There may have been an early morning or two where the temp danced barely below the zero mark – but it was but a momentary flirtation and by mid-morning every thermometer in town was well into the double digits above. It’s been well over a year since we’ve had a day of character-building cold, and while that might have a welcome impact on the fuel bill it’s worrisome nonetheless.

And it’s not just down here in the balmy counties. Only a week ago I was strolling along a beach, enjoying a mild breeze as the waves lapped the shore. It would be a scene evocative of a welcome break from an arduous winter were it not that I was strolling the Duluth lake front and from the Lift Bridge to Thunder Bay the North Shore was as wave washed in January as on the Fourth of July.  

That is not as Minnesota should be. Or, at least, that’s not how Minnesota has been – at least not for the relatively short span of time I’ve been around to notice.

Now at first that might not seem like such a bad thing. I doubt if there’s been an autumn in the last 15,000 years or so that folks have taken up residence in these parts that we haven’t greeted the first frost with an ardent wish for a mild winter – a wish that was but rarely granted. Of course, a couple thousand years ago, old Aesop cautioned, “Be careful what you wish for,” and maybe all that wishing is proving incautious.  It’s a vexing fact that, change one thing and a whole lot of things change with it. So, if Minnesota winters turn into Missouri winters what else is gonna change along with it? What price do we pay for turning Lake Superior into the Wisconsin Riviera? Are jumper cables gathering dust in the trunk gonna mean dust storms in Kansas six months from now?

Maybe we don’t want to find out. It might finally be time to do more than just make a wish.