Preparing for Winter
November 12th, 2004,We’ve been in Minnesota three months now and are settling right in. In our short time here we’ve already experienced three seasons: the end of summer, a brief fall, and the beginning of winter. Daily low temperatures will likely be below freezing all season, which usually lasts five months, roughly from November to March.
Local weatherman Paul Douglas–the world’s best weatherman, in fact, better even than Jon Nese in Philly and that tornado guy in Oklahoma, and a good writer too–recently wrote in his daily Star Tribune forecast that winter in the Upper Midwest is two weeks shorter on average than it was 50 years ago, thanks to global warming. The effects of global warming are more pronounced nearer to the poles, so we northerners benefit more than most. Sea levels will rise, and places such as Florida will have to deal with a loss of land–not to mention more hurricanes–while we will get to enjoy warmer weather. OK, it won’t really be that much warmer here, at least not for a while, and it won’t be anywhere near Florida’s winter temperatures. But you might want to invest in Minnesota real estate, which is likely to rise in value as more people (three, maybe?) decide the climate here has become just barely tolerable. OK, so real estate probably won’t rise as much as in San Diego. But then again, San Diego will be submerged eventually anyway.
We’ve broken out our winter clothes and prepared the house and our small yard for winter. I’ve shut off the water leading to the outside water faucet. Here, if a pipe is not in a heated location or buried below the frostline, you can kiss it goodbye. The water will freeze, expand, and burst the pipe. In California they can get away with putting some insulation over water pipes that might possibly freeze; I don’t think they even turn off the water fountains in the winter in most of California. Here even indoor pipes can burst if you’re not careful. Once I insulated around an air conditioner in an apartment in Minneapolis, inadvertently cutting off a pipe from heat and causing it to freeze and break during a cold snap. The result: water on the floor and no heat (it was a hot-water heating pipe that was not on for a few hours, ironically).
Many of you in cold climates are already familiar with other rituals of winter preparedness: rake the leaves before the snow comes; clean out the gutters; wash the windows; if you have old windows, you may have to put up storm windows; put some survival gear (shovel, blankets, flashlight, etc.) in your car. Such is the preparation as the suspense builds. Will the first snow be massive, as it was on Halloween in 1991, when 30 inches of snow fell in 24 hours? I happened to be in Minnesota that winter taking a year off from graduate school, when that storm left the roads with a slushy snow that then froze, gluing an icy, rib-rattling washboard to the pavement. Or will it be the more normal dusting that melts the next day? The winters here are entirely unpredictable. We may have little snow and above-freezing temperatures regularly, or we might be buried under deep drifts with subzero temperatures for weeks on end. Or we might have any combination of these variables.
Whatever the outcome, I am more and more optimistic that we will thrive here. We even received a good omen on Tuesday night: a surprising display of the northern lights. I can’t remember ever seeing them before. At first they looked like lines or beams of light streaming down from a hole at the top of the sky. Later they were a whitish-green glow in the sky, almost like cloud cover. At another time they were more of a dancing shimmer, like what I’ve heard about and seen in pictures.
The display was too faint and monochromatic to be stunning, at least from my vantage point, but it was beautiful nonetheless. My patient sky watching paid off in another way as well. I saw a falling star create a momentary line of brilliant fire across the sky. This too I call a good omen.