Winter

“Now is the Winter of our Discontent. . .”

Shakespeare

                One has to be hardy to live through a Minnesota winter.  And this past winter tested even the hardiest of us.  This is especially true for the non-native Minnesotans, like myself, who ventured north for opportunity and not for the weather.  Since moving here in 1989, I have learned to count the seasons differently.  Here, there are five:  winter, spring, summer, autumn, winter. 

                My struggles with winters are compounded by the fact that I spent the first 28 years of my life living in Sacramento, California.  While not a beach-front Malibu, its winters were certainly much less challenging than Alberta Clippers and blizzards and white-out road conditions.  Winter or summer (which has its own weather challenges), I soon learned that in Minnesota, if you’re hitting the highway, check the weather.  Sudden violent storms (blizzards and tornado-producing thunderheads) lurk just over the horizon.  In the Southwest corner of my adopted state, the prairie affords no natural barriers to block the incessant wind.  Snow can fall horizontally in the howling wind here.  Rain can be blown under the shingles of your roof to find a way into your kitchen. 

                Although Sacramento is not, say, an island in the Mediterranean, it certainly stacks up pretty well against a Minnesota winter.  Tule fog was our greatest threat.  And to have such thick ground fog, there must be no wind.  And the air temp stays above 32˚.  We thought it was cold, but it really wasn’t. 

One of my favorite TV shows when I was a California boy was West Point, a weekly series that dramatized the heroism of military officers who graduated from that service academy.  Each episode usually began with the hero as a green cadet who always seemed to get into trouble.  Every week some officer always yelled at a troublesome plebe warning the callow youth he would never make it. 

                A common punishment for wayward cadets was to have them march back and forth across a large quad.  In true TV fashion, to show the passage of time, several scenes would be blended through the changing of the seasons.  The camera would focus on the errant cadet’s feet, and, by the magic of TV, the ground around those pacing feet would get rained on then snowed on.  What took a few moments to pace off gave the impression of passing weeks then months.  Rain to snow to melt-off just before the commercial.

                My reaction to those feet pacing in snow was always the same.  How could anyone live in snow, I would ask?  At the time, I wanted to attend West Point; I was young and impressionable.  But live where it snowed?  Not for me, that icy life.

                Life kept me in California until I was 28.  After college, I worked on my MA in English literature and taught high school for four years all in and around Sacramento.  But, I was ambitious, anxious to move on to teaching at the university level and willing to put my feet in the waters of what lay beyond my hometown so long as it was along the West Coast.

                I applied to ten PhD schools:  five in California, two others on the West Coast, and a few token ones well beyond Utah just in case.  The tokens didn’t matter.  I was going to Cal or UCLA or at least UC Davis, a campus twenty minutes from home. 

Soon, the rejections piled up.  Berkeley, no!  UCLA, no!  Davis, no!  Those token places out East and in the Midwest increasingly grew more and more likely.  Harsh reality forced me to hatch a new plan:  cross the Sierras in an inverse move of those pioneers of the Gold Rush, snatch up my PhD in record time, and return to teach in California.  I just presumed I would come back to Sacramento State, where I earned my MA, and where I felt I belonged.  I couldn’t imagine living or teaching anywhere else.

                The last winter I taught high school in Sacramento, I lived with my parents because my father was seriously ill.  We didn’t know it, but he had less than two years to live.  That winter was also the worst winter in South Bend, Indiana, home of the University of Notre Dame.  WNDU, an NBC affiliate, was then located on the campus.  When the famous blizzard of 1978 socked Notre Dame, it made national news with live shots of snow piled up to second-story dorm windows and a campus blanketed to stillness.

                Notre Dame was one of the campuses that hadn’t yet rejected me.  And thanks to a WNDU feed, my father and I watched nightly for a week in January 1978 as a three-foot layer of snow and lamppost-high drifts closed the Notre Dame campus for the first time in a century.

                This was not sunny California.

                After the storm but while the campus was still closed, my dad and I sat safe and warm in front of our TV and watched students file into the ND basketball arena for a game.  ND insisted the game go on, so on it went even if the visiting team had to struggle to reach the campus.  True to form, the Irish student body came out of their snow-bound dorms and flowed towards the arena, their heads barely visible along the snow-cleared path.  A trench had been carved out for them just for this game.  It was like watching a white-shrouded World War I trench system without barbed wire.  The famous Golden Dome stood majestic but snow-covered, no longer gold.

                “How can anyone live in that?” I demanded, disdaining every thought of a snowy winter, especially with snow piled higher than your head.

                “You’re going to go to Notre Dame,” my dad replied, a man of few words.  He was a Notre Dame Subway Alum.  None of his four sons had attended ND.  His not-so-secret ambition in life:  have one of us earn an ND degree.

                A few weeks later, I got my acceptance letter from the Golden Dome, with a promise of four years of teaching to pay my way through.  It was a graduate teaching position, the best way to finance further education.  I may have been an idealistic English teacher, but I knew my four years of high school experience amounted to something.  Notre Dame agreed.  Besides graduate seminars and exams and a dissertation, I graded stacks and stacks of freshmen papers over the next several years, but the exchange was well worth it.

                Rather quickly, I even grew to appreciate harsh Midwest winters.  During my third year there, I went cross-country skiing with a young woman originally from Chicago who had winter down pat.  She was a graduate of Notre Dame; her senior year was that blizzard winter I had watched with my father.  I may have seen her on her way to that game.  Who knows?  Out skiing, I wore so many layers, I could hardly move.  After repeated falls, I split my pants down the backside seam.  She married me anyway.

                I don’t think of Minnesota winters in quite the same way as I did while living in California.  They are prolonged (and this past one especially so with snow even at the end of April), but they can be endured.  Once here, I bought a snow blower then up-scaled it to a larger model.  Now, I hire two strapping fellows to clear my long driveway.  I own parkas and overcoats, multiple scarves, several pairs of boots, sets of gloves.  Beyond all that, I’ve made tremendous friends who make trying situations bearable.  Their native (and non-native) good humor about winters of Ice Age proportions reminds me that those frozen months are as much a prolonged season as a state of mind.  Their warm hearts make life flourish here all year, every year.

And yet, when I teach the Percy Shelly poem “Ode to the West Wind” which ends:  “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” I still remind my students that Shelley was living in sunny Italy when he wrote that, not Minnesota.