BETCHA CAN’T LICK THAT FENCE POST! – Acquiring a Taste for Winter

SOMETHING IN THE AIR
It’s been said that the Inuit language has scores of different words for snow. While most linguists dispute this, wouldn’t it make sense for a culture in which snow is such a constant, intimate presence? I suppose we’d have lots of words too if snow were more than an inconvenience to us—or if we paid more attention to its sublime beauty.

            

No matter how well equipped you are to describe snow, the stuff has many amazing qualities. Its sheer whiteness; its power and beauty as a reflector of the sun, from enchanting sparkle to blinding glare; the incredible designs of its flakes, shards and pellets; the range of textures those particles create en masse—from powder to “corn,” to snowball-able, to slush; the graceful shapes it assumes when sculpted by the wind; and its ability to record everything from the passing of a vole to the progression of climate change over millennia.

An airplane, sounding so close it must be coming 
in for a landing, is really a speck, still three or 
four miles up.

One of the silver linings of those crystal clear 20-below-zero nights we have up here is the sounds. When it gets that cold, the air’s usually so dry that the snow sounds like Styrofoam when you walk or drive on it. As a January evening’s concert lets out, the hall’s yet-unplowed parking lot becomes its own musical postlude, a chorus of squeaks, crunches and groans from scores of tires compressing tiny crystals.

Extreme winter temperatures also do amazing things to the atmosphere. You can almost feel the molecules of subzero air huddling closer together. The world seems to compress around you. Sound carries differently too, as if you were inside a big box.

Music, kids’ laughter and the clatter of hockey sticks, carrying from a rink three blocks away, sound like they’re right next-door. An airplane flies over, sounding so close it must be coming in for a landing. You look up and see that it’s a speck, still three or four miles up.

     

LESSONS COOL AND CRUEL
There’s a whole library of winter folklore up here on what we call the frozen tundra. One example: when it’s minus 25 or more, you take a pan of boiling water outside and throw the water up into the air. The droplets freeze so fast that they explode into a fine, frozen mist with a loud hiss.

Extreme cold like this exerts a strange attraction on some folks. One night a few years ago, the temperature in Tower MN reached minus 60. (That’s the thermometer temperature, not the wind-chill index.) When the forecast came out, people flocked up there from all over the state to camp out that night. All survived, though many of their cars required defibrillation.

I noticed something on one of the metal posts. I shuddered when, on closer inspection, I discovered the distinct taste buds.

When I was in grade school, I was walking home one January afternoon and came to a chain-link fence I passed nearly every day. This time I noticed something on one of the metal posts. I shuddered when, on closer inspection, I discovered the distinct taste buds. It was a quarter-inch-square piece of some poor kid’s tongue.

Everyone around here knows that story; it’s part of the mythology. But I know—and, more poignantly, that poor, gullible kid knows—it’s true.

Playing hockey outdoors before indoor rinks were common was a lesson in physics. Steel on ice, both of them rock-hard solids, one gliding effortlessly, not on the other, but on a thin film of water. Rubber pucks, their molecular structure transformed by the cold, shattering like glass when they hit the goalpost just right.

Flesh, exposed to minus 50 wind-chill, turning in blotches from red to frostbite white. Capillaries in toes, feeling like a thousand needle stabs, flowing again as they warmed from their pre-frostbite numbness.

HEAT YOUR HEART OUT
All right, I know everyone who lives anywhere has his or her own  war stories about their weather. But I say you can have your hurricanes and heat waves, your supercells and sand storms. I’ll take the winter weather wonders of Minnesota any day. C’mon, I know you’re envious! 

ON STEEL AND WATER – The Marvels of Ice Skating

LIKE BUTTER
Back when I played college ice hockey, I used to love being the first player out on the rink before a game or at the start of a new period. That was when the ice was pristine, freshly planed and recoated by the Zamboni. I always thought to myself it was like skating on butter, a metaphor not as much for the physical qualities of fresh ice as for its deliciousness.

For one exquisite lap, mine were the only marks on that translucent, milky surface. I could take one powerful stride and coast the length of the rink. Even more fun, though, was
taking that first lap fast, with long, powerful strides. I'd look behind me at the graceful, outward sweeping lines my blades were etching into the ice. Each one threw a dusting of bright white snow, chiseled by the angled steel edge. The pleasure of that pattern reminded me of the trail of swirls one leaves canoeing across a glassy lake.

In those moments, skating was a sort of meditation.

In those moments, skating was a sort of meditation, a deep awareness not just of the esthetics, but of that sublime progression of muscles, motions and balance that comprise a skating stride. It starts with a subtle lowering of the center of gravity as hip and knee contract and weight begins transferring to that leg.

The extension comes, almost imperceptibly, from the buttocks; then the thigh thrusts outward while the knee straightens; and finally, like the exclamation point at the end of a command, the ankle straightens sharply, the toes and ball of the foot driving the blade's curved toe into the ice and impelling the transfer of weight back to the other leg. That last little snap of force makes a distinct munching sound as the blade bites deeper into the ice. Instead of snow, little chips of ice fly.

CLEAR BLACKNESS

Skating outdoors on natural ice is very different. Ideal conditions are rare. In fact, in my lifetime, I've only experienced them a handful of times. Instead of the silky, milky white of man-made ice, the perfect natural ice is black. In fact, it has that paradoxical quality of clear blackness, like the water of a pond rich in dissolved organic material. Black ice occurs only when it's below freezing for some time before the first snowfall. And there can't be lots of wind while that bare ice is forming, or it will have humps and waves.

Cracks wind through black ice like white ribbons on edge.

Once in a great while, a fleeting, surreal image 
will catch your eye: a fish frozen into the ice.

Skating on perfect black ice is a rare and wonderful experience. Because it nearly always occurs early in winter, you're always wondering if the ice is thick enough to support your weight. Supposedly only three inches will do it for someone walking, but will that hold true when all that weight's concentrated on a 3/16-inch blade? It only seems to sweeten the experience knowing there's twenty feet of ice water below. As if to remind you, dull thumps and snaps reverberate through the ice as it contracts and shifts.

Outdoor skating's normally confined to a rink—that is, whatever portion of the ice you've managed to clear of snow. But with black ice you have the whole lake. If you're lucky—with extraordinarily smooth ice and some wind at your back—you can coast all the way across the lake.

FROZEN IN TIME
Another wonder of black ice is that you can see what's going inside of it. Here and there cracks wind through the ice like white ribbons on edge, showing its thickness. Bubbles are frozen in time. Once in a great while, a fleeting, surreal image will catch your eye: a fish frozen into the ice. You stop and look, wondering how it could possibly have not been able to swim away as the water, passing from 33 to 32 degrees, started to set around it.   

I know there are other skaters out there. What are your observations?