So How Do You Like Our Winters?

“Aw, you guys have POOOSSEY winters!”

“...now the warriors of winter, they give a cold, triumphant shout;
And all that stays is dying, all that lives is getting out.
See the geese in chevron flights, flapping and racing on before the snow
They got the urge for going, and they’ve got the wings so they can go.”

       — Joni Mitchell, once a young girl from Saskatchewan, "Urge for Going"

©Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Sociology/winters.htm
1/31/08

A few years after I moved to Siskiyou County, we had a fourteen-foot snowstorm. It buried everything. The morning after the storm, I woke up at 8am, and the house was still dark. The snow had piled up past the roof eaves. Our dogs dug us out.

A few days after, when the power came back and phone service was restored, an acquaintance, fond of twitting new arrivals from Southern California, called and asked me how I liked the Siskiyou County winters.

Well, I had lived in Southern California for quite a few years prior to moving, but originally, I’m from Canada, and if there is one thing about Canada that all Canadians take pride in, it’s the rotten weather. I wasn’t about to let the side down.

I leaned back in my chair and waved a hand dismissively, a foolish thing to do since we were talking on the phone and he couldn’t see me. “Aw, you guys have POOOSSEY winters!”

I suspect that rankled, because yesterday, after six weeks of blowing and drifting snow and fierce winds and temperatures that hovered below freezing for weeks on end, he called me up and asked me the same question. Fifteen years later.

If the years have failed to mellow me, they have also failed to make me any smarter. I sat back in my chair and waved a hand dismissively, even though he could not see me. “Aw, you guys have POOOSSEY winters!”

Note to the police: if you get called to my office and find me dead with a still-melting icicle planted in my brain, there is a name and an address in my desk. Talk to him first.

The locals talk of “old fashioned Siskiyou winters” and it isn’t just tricks of memory. I note those tricks of memory: I can remember when I was a kid the snow would reach up to my chest. But I was only three foot tall at the time.

The meteorological data back the old timers up. This place used to be a lot snowier (in the thirties, the average snowfall was half again what it is now) and a lot colder. In most years, we get a bunch of snow, and it melts fairly rapidly. (1993, the year of the Great Snow, was an exception: we still had patches of snow in our north yard as late as the Fourth of July). I have a 1934 edition of the local newspaper, then, as now, a weekly. Suits were five dollars, bread was a dime a loaf, phone numbers had two or three digits, and the editorial called for a ban on handguns. It mentioned on the back page that after three weeks, the highway leading past my house would be opening again, after the snowstorm in late February that closed it.

Three weeks. Wow. We consider ourselves put out if that road is closed overnight because some twit in an 18wheeler decided he would probably not have to chain up and wound up on his side at Snowman’s Summit. But then, snow usually melts away quickly. We get five feet, or ten, and in a few days, the roads are clear and dry, and the trees are free of snow. Only the snow on the ground lingers.

If it makes my acquaintance feel better (and perhaps belays my death from sudden intrusion by organized water molecules) I was walking up from the snowlot where we all park our cars when a lot of snow is expected and enjoying the nicest afternoon we had seen in a while. It was sunny and bright, just a little wind. It was also 25 at three in the afternoon, about twenty degrees cooler than we might normally expect, and puffs of white dust chased themselves among the pines.

Unlike Canadian winters, life was still evident. A couple of blue jays argued about supremacy of a white fir. Two ravens, dour old protestant ministers in black frock coats, gathered together to consider the corpse of a grey ground squirrel. A neighbor’s yard showed that a racoon had stopped by to scope out the garbage, or perhaps a dish of cat foot unwisely left out.

But when I pulled air through my nose, my nostrils stuck together briefly, an oddly satisfying sensation I remembered as a kid. The snow had a texture and sound as I walked on it that spoke of the Rockies, rather than the Cascades. The light was different, sharper and more exact in some undefinable way.

One friend is writing a piece for the local paper, noting that this winter took many people by surprise after 14 straight years of mild winters. A lot of people, including a lot of locals, were caught out. A lot of homes depend on electricity for heat, either directly or to regulate other forms of heat such as pellet stoves and Monitor heaters, and they were hit by power blackouts that left them shivering in the dark. Many people thought their phone service was out. It wasn’t, but they had cordless phones, and without the base units, the phones didn’t work. I nearly made that same mistake, arguing to ditch the one corded phone we had left because the dogs kept knocking it off the table. My wife overruled me – wisely, as it turned out.

A lot of people, used to driving on slushy roads, had to learn a whole new set of reflexes for driving on white ice. (Rule number one: you have no brakes. Don’t even bother trying). People who are a bit less trusting in modern technology have wood stoves, and they, like me, are noticing their wood is being consumed at a disconcerting pace. We split enough wood to get us through the winter. At least, through what we had come to think of as a typical winter. We’ll make it, but we might have to put up with some chilly days in late February. We’ve got lots of wood out back – under a tarp, which is under four feet of hard-frozen snow, and which is, itself, frozen.

The climate here is changing, and it’s made a lot of people vaguely uneasy. We see the green tentacles of vegetation slowly climbing the slopes of Mount Shasta while the last glacier on Eddy Mountain winked out of existence last August, and we wonder what is in store.

So even though everyone, myself included, is griping about the cold, and the ice, and the seemingly endless snow (another 24 inches expected tonight and tomorrow) and I’m getting in touch with my inner Canadian child, we’re all secretly feeling a slight sense of relief.

It isn’t a particularly rational relief, because we know it’s just one part of one winter, and that the strange Pooossey winters that have become the new norm will return, rain and slush and green grass in February, but still, it’s a sense of relief, a sense that however briefly, we’ve returned to a time when the climate wasn’t all screwed up and we could count on winter to be winter.

We may never see it again. Or, through some oddity caused by global warming it could be a harbinger of cold, fierce winters, a visit from the weather that once frequented Whitehorse. Nobody really knows.

Suits aren’t five dollars. Bread isn’t a dime. Telephone numbers have ten digits. But it’s 22 and snowing outside, and that’s as it should be.