I’ve written a lot in this column about winter. Winter, much more than summer, is what sets the Upper Midwest apart from most of the country. It’s what this place is famous for. Winter presents a condition of climate different from other seasons not just in degree but in kind. When you drop below the freezing point of water, lots of physical changes occur–your body shivers, snow appears from the sky and stays on the ground, sidewalks become slippery, and machinery becomes difficult to operate. And winter is never very far away, especially in the northern part of the region. July is the only month that there has never been a recorded snowfall in Minnesota.

But summer deserves my attention as well. Summer brings a season in the Upper Midwest that is only slightly cooler than the rest of the United States. And as the temperature rises to its summer highs, there is no crucial point similar to the freezing point of water, no phase change that occurs. Thankfully, we do not reach water’s boiling point, although sometimes it feels like we do.

While it can certainly be hot here, it’s not as hot as Atlanta, Houston, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Phoenix, or St. Louis–nor is it as humid as those cities, with the exception of Phoenix. The temperature has not reached 100 degrees in Minneapolis-St. Paul since 1995–10 years ago–and the Twin Cities have not had more than one day over 100 in a summer since 1988–17 years ago–when there were three days above 100.

For an idea about how summer temperatures in the Upper Midwest compare to other cities, take a look at this list of average high temperatures in July:

Duluth, Minnesota: 76
Boston: 82
Minneapolis: 83
Philadelphia: 87
St. Louis: 89
Atlanta: 89
New Orleans: 91
Sacramento: 93
Houston: 94
Phoenix: 105

I wrote about the “weather dividend” last winter. That’s the benefit you get, weatherwise, from being in one place rather than another. In January, the weather dividend for most people goes to warmer places, unless you like snow sports. In the summer, northern places get the weather dividend, unless you really like warm weather. Here in the Upper Midwest, we’ll collect our weather dividend checks right now, thank you.

Recent Weather

We had a rainy spring and early summer this year. Nearly every day in May and early June we got some rain–sometimes two or more times in a day. Dark clouds were always rolling in from the south or the west or northwest.

Lately it’s been hot and there’s been little rain, which has had the benefit of greatly reducing the number of mosquitoes. In July we had at least 14 days in a row above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, with the latter part of that very humid, including dewpoints above 80 degrees in southern Minnesota. Quite a hot streak, and a nice change from winter.

It’s turned cool again, however–52 degrees when I got up yesterday. Just a few days ago we woke up to a humid 80 degrees.

Source: weatherbase.com

Your intrepid correspondent is now writing to you from outside the region. I’m in the Princeton, New Jersey, area, where I’m working for my old employer, Educational Testing Service, for a couple of weeks. I’ll be going home soon and am eager to see my wife and daughter again.

My return to Princeton has given me an occasion to remember my first move out of the Midwest. It was the summer of 1988 and there was a severe drought all across the country, with very hot weather to boot. Only a few months before I had received one of the most important letters of my life–an acceptance into the graduate program in English at Princeton University.

I can still remember that acceptance letter: the heft of the thick envelope, the official look of the cover letter, and the carbon-paper smell and crinkle of the forms. Princeton had offered me a four-year fellowship that would pay for tuition and a $6000 stipend per year–not all that much even back then, but enough to get by. I would have to teach in my third and fourth years, but for the first two years, I would have no responsibilities other than my classes. I would be paid to learn! It was my first experience of Princeton’s great wealth, my first look into its atmosphere of privilege.

I was sorry to be leaving my one-bedroom apartment in Dinkytown, the Minneapolis neighborhood near the University of Minnesota. I had gotten used to the space and privacy of my own apartment, which I had earned by working as an apartment caretaker and taking summer jobs. Now I would have to give it up for a soulless room in a modern Princeton dorm.

I packed up my belongings and put a dorm-room-size load of books and other stuff into the smallest U-Haul trailer available, which was hitched to my 1976 Dodge Aspen station wagon (inherited from my Grandpa Jack) and headed east on Interstate 94.

I’d driven to Chicago before, though perhaps only with my family, so the trip through Wisconsin and northern Illinois was familiar. I passed through beautiful, rolling Wisconsin countryside, through the strange, flat, piney landscape of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, with its unusual rock outcroppings; through the Madison area, a college radio island; then into the corn-field prairie of southern Wisconsin. As I drove south out of Wisconsin, I left the Upper Midwest and its quieter roads behind. Free highway travel was now behind me. It would be tolls all the way from Chicago to the New Jersey border as I made my way across the nation’s busy midsection.

I stayed with my aunt and uncle in Chicago the first night. If I remember right, the next day I opted for the route that took me near downtown Chicago. I’ve always marveled at that city’s size and thrilled to see its lakeside skyline. For me Chicago is a metaphor of the larger world beyond home. But on this trip there was no stopping in downtown Chicago. It was onto northern Indiana, at which point I popped a tape of John Cougar Mellencamp into the tape deck and enjoyed the pretty, rolling scenery. I also had Bruce Springsteen music with me on the trip, as preparation for New Jersey and fitting accompaniment for the road.

Most of the drama of this trip was internal, though on I-80 outside of Toledo I had a flat tire and had to fix it on the side of the freeway. That entailed unhitching the trailer and emptying the back of the station wagon. Fortunately, the damaged tire was not on the traffic side. Then, it was on through more parched landscape to Pennsylvania, where I took I-76 towards the southern part of the state.

I spent an anxious night in a cheap, somewhat rundown motel in Somerset, Pennsylvania–after having decided not to stay at the name-brand motels. I felt troubled by the unfamiliar, seedy surroundings. I woke up early and hit the road again, and the scenery restored me. I passed through Pennsylvania mountains then into densely peopled New Jersey, finally entering leafy Princeton.

Here I was at the next stage of my life, eager for what it would bring, both welcoming and fearing new things.