Cold? Really? Really cold

At least partially inspired by the post the other day about defining terms for cold, a friend sent an email to her friends giving her cold story and asking if anyone else had a story about extreme cold. Hmmm extreme cold, now what does that mean? In Brazil. In Alaska. In Antarctica.

She received many entertaining responses. One of them really stood out.

It was written by a woman named Amy Modig who grew up in Interior Alaska where one often encountered temperatures of 50 below zero or more. This was just part of her story:

“60 below was not something anyone would hop around in unless you absolutely had to. I remember having to run up the long, long driveway with my two brothers to catch the bus to school at -58, trying to time it so we wouldn't have to wait too long for the bus or make the bus wait for us. Of course, the buses wouldn't come at 60 below. What a thrill that was. We could stay home with our intermittent nosebleeds and hair that stuck straight out from electric charges - the air pressure was so high during a deep cold snap it was really really dry. But we could make electric arcs between our fingers two inches long!

“Cold was so exhilarating, but only because there was a warm place to get to. Yikes. But then I discovered that people didn't have to live that way really and I moved… to Anchorage.”

I thought the picture above was pretty funny and demonstrates according to the caption what happens to whiskey at minus 51 degrees. To be honest I copied it from a gallery on a facebook page called I’m from Alaska. 30 degrees is not cold. It is a fun page with at this point 79 pictures of cold people have experienced. On the second to last gallery page is a picture of a rear view mirror thermometer showing minus 40. That’s mine.

Birds and boys

You just never know what sort of influence you might be having on your kids and of course they are never going to tell you, but I realized one tonight and it was a pretty good one.

A friend of mine wrote a nice, thoughtful piece in the paper tonight about his young son’s encounter with a flock of Bohemian waxwings in the past week. It reminded me of my own son’s adventures with birds or at least my efforts to encourage some adventures and I thought maybe it would be an idea for my friend to try.

In the house my son and I shared every other week for seven years we had huge picture windows that overlooked a large woodland. Of course there were birds, a wide variety and we put out feeders for them. There were enough different species that I suggested we keep a life list. I called it “Our extra special picture window life list” and we taped it to the glass. The rule was we both had to see the bird and we had to identify it exactly, no “little brown chippies.” Over the next few years we added to that list often. Once in a while I would take it down and type the new ones into the computer to replace the handwritten ones and then tape it back up. That windowsill was always cluttered with bird identification books and binoculars.

Our favorites were the Steller’s jays who came to the deck for the peanuts we put out for them. They came every day in winter, often in gangs. One day we counted 13 on the deck and in the nearby trees waiting for their turn to swoop in for a peanut. We even recognized a few individuals. One we called Tank was noticeably bigger than the others and we swore the house shook when he landed. There was a day, too, when I hadn’t put any peanuts out yet. I heard a tapping on the window and when I went to look there was a jay perched on the back of a deck chair pecking at the window, demanding nuts.

Another favorite of mine was sometimes we could see a chickadee start from way deep in the woods and make a line in that up and down wave-like flight pattern they fly straight to the feeder that held sunflower seeds.

There are too many stories about the birds we saw and what they did for me to relate in a short blog post but they were almost constant entertainment. A friend from way back in high school visited once and added several species to his life list just sitting drinking coffee one morning.

My son more tolerated my passion for it more than he actually participated. But he surprised me when he was in sixth grade and wanted to do his science project testing what foods the jays would like best. His project won a statewide science fair division and earned him a big blue ribbon from a birding group.

After that junior high school took over and he got way too cool for dad’s bird interests. and I never noticed him paying much attention to birds again.

I hadn’t realized it until just today as I was telling my friend about our life list when it hit me. On our square-rigger sail this summer it came up we needed a bird identification book and no one seemed to have brought one. Turns out one person had. My 20-year-old son quickly produced his, the only one among that environmentally conscious crew to have one. And it was in telling my friend about it today that I realized what an event that really had been, the realization that at some point I had planted a positive idea with a growing boy. Perhaps in the encounter with the Bohemian waxwings, my friend has planted the same sort of idea with his son and one day the boy will reveal that influence to his father as well. I can tell him now it is one great, if unexpected, reward for being a parent.

Here is the last life list from the picture window:

JUSTIN AND TIM'S VERY SPECIAL PICTURE WINDOW LIFE LIST

(Seen through our window by both of us and confirmed with bird books)

Birds we've seen                                             Birds we've heard

Varied Thrush                                             Owl (Saw whet)

Steller's Jay                                                      Woodpecker

Common Redpoll                                             Loon

Robin                                                               Birds we fed

Raven                                                               Steller's jay

Hermit Thrush                                             Black-capped chickadee

Wilson's Warbler                                             Rufous humingbird

Hairy Woodpecker                                             Redpolls

Bald Eagle                                                      Red breasted nuthatch

Black-capped Chickadee                                    Junco

Black billed Magpie                                    3-toed woodpecker

Rufous Humingbird                                    Pine grosbeak (m&f)

Red-breasted Nuthatch                                    Pine siskin

Dark-eyed Junco

Three-toed Woodpecker

Pine Grosbeak (m & f)

Blackpoll warbler

Pine siskin

Downey woodpecker

Sharp-shinned hawk

Great horned owl

Violet green swallow

Dad saw:  Hawk, either red-tailed or sharp-shinned

                        and, either red-tailed immature or Goshawk; also a falcon, probably peregrin

My friend's story: Waxwing diversion

How cold was it? Really?

Try fighting a school fire at 50 below. Galena, Alaska Be sure to read the comments on the related story.

Oh yeah? How cold was it?

Driving to work today I got to thinking maybe it sounds like I am complaining about the weather too much. Actually I don’t think I am complaining at all, just curious about what things happen and why. And, I was thinking it hasn’t been that bad. I mean temperatures seldom below zero and then only a little. I should have stopped right there. Came home tonight and it was 20 below. Had to start a fire and plug in the car overnight.

One thing that happens to Alaskans is sooner or later you are going to have to explain to someone Outside how cold it is.

Which led to the next thought which was how do you explain cold. I learned about this from a Norman Mailer novel called “Tough Guys Don’t Dance.” His lesson was make adjectives specific and relative. His example was the word “strong” and he pointed out how the word means different things to different people.

Mine is cold. Years ago I wrote one of those “as-told-to” sports books with a woman sled dog racer. She was very good at recall and most of her descriptions were at least adequate if not literature. But her favorite adjective was “really,” as in it was really cold or that was really hard and my response always had to be “how cold was it.” In one part she went out into a really bad storm and of course it was really cold. I finally got this out of her. Wrapped tightly in her sleeping bag, her breath froze to the zipper and when she tried to get out of it she found she couldn’t move the zipper. You will have to read the book to find out how she did it. But that’s cold.

Still my favorite “that’s cold” statement came from a girl in the Delta Junction elementary school. Now, Delta is one of the colder spots in Alaska, deep in the Interior. During a writing class I was explaining to the kids that if they write in Delta only that it’s cold and someone in Miami reads it, that person is probably going to think something like 40 degrees. And then I asked the kids how cold is it when it is cold in Delta? Their response was 50 below zero. So I asked them if you are trying to explain that kind of cold to someone in Miami what do you tell them? They were quiet. And then I asked, OK what has ever happened to you when it was that cold. One girl raised her hand and I called on her. At just barely more than a whisper she said, “One time my boots froze to the floor of the school bus.”

That’s really cold.

Now, for outsiders who would like to understand, and for Alaskans who need something to show Outsiders what happens in the cold, I am going to give you a link. There is a fellow who works for the University of Alaska Fairbanks and it seems forever he has written a weekly column about science that is distributed to newspapers across the state. To give you an idea how good he is, most of them print it including the one I work for. His name is Ned Rozell and in this column, he went through a typical morning in a Fairbanks household as everyone heads off for their day with the temperature at minus 40 degrees. But, he adds easy to understand science that explains what is going on with the physics of it. Don’t be afraid, it is a pleasant read and not very long. It’s either that or put up with more posts on here explaining what "really, really cold" means.

They can't take Serenity

At 15 degrees Fahrenheit, a fifty mile an hour wind hits you like cold steel pellets. It gives meaning to wind chill, much more so than those weak stuff weather folks on TV using wind chill to inflate the numbers so the temperature sounds more severe than it really is. Hunched against it in the Walmart parking lot I didn’t even see my prescription go flying out of my cart and never missed that little bag until I got home 20 miles away. Fortunately Walmart called, it seems one good citizen found it and returned it to the pharmacy counter. Thank you to an unknown but great Alaskan.

It has been that way around here. Fifteen and blowing 50 in the Governor Interrupted's town, but 5 below and calm here. The other night it was 7 when I left work, 31 where I turned onto the blue highway, 28 when I crossed the river but two miles farther on at the house, 5, stinking 5 degrees and just 10 miles away, 31. How deep is my hole.

It has all driven me to this: wood stove going and almost 90 in the house, starting Firefly at the beginning: take my love, take my land. take me where I cannot stand, I don’t care, I’m still free, they can’t take the sky from me ....

Winter blahs

On a hillside steep enough it would take reaching from tree to tree to climb, a moose stands nibbling at twigs, very visible backed by what snow the wind and rain left behind. This is the same hillside where a year ago in the dark, a moose seemed to drop out of the sky into the headlights after it careened down the slope.

That wind and rain left very little snow except in the shadows. Some people in Alaska last week experienced a 100-degree temperature change. Minus 50 at Christmas to plus 50 at New Year’s. Much more than a person should have to bear. Here it went from 20 below to 45 above in the same time frame and it looks like that brown dead period in the fall or the days before Green Day in the spring.

The avalanche danger was so high the field testers who check that sort of thing didn’t dare go because the warming made the snow pack dangerously unstable.

Life in limbo caught between seasons except we are supposed to be in the middle of winter. But the days supposedly are getting brighter though we haven’t seen the sun in a while.