Record-breaking winter brings memories of Alaska

(photo by Kevin Povenz)

My wife, Kathy, and I had planned to drive to Chicago last weekend. But we prudently canceled after the horrific pileup on I-94 near Michigan City, Ind. that killed three and wrecked more than 40 vehicles. News reports said drivers were blinded by a sudden whiteout from “lake effect” snow.

Whiteouts are something I remember all too well from back in the mid-1960’s, when I was living in Alaska. I had hitched a ride with a bush pilot from Kotzebue, a tiny community on the eastern shore of the Bering Sea, heading northeast toward Barrow, when we ran into a whiteout. The light faded into ghostly white. No sun, anywhere. I could not tell up from down, side from side.

The pilot looked over at me, and took out a socket wrench. “Put your hands in your lap and fold them together. If I see you move, even a twitch, I will hit you in the head with this wrench.”

How come? “The last guy I had up in a whiteout panicked and grabbed the controls. The only thing to do in a whiteout is don’t look out, focus only at the controls and climb gently.

“Eventually, you’ll get out.”

He was right – we did. And eventually, we too will get out of this Arctic weather, which has set all-time January records for snow. As of this writing we’d already had more than 31.5 inches of snowfall, topping the previous record of 29.6 inches, set in January, 1978 – and as I write, it’s snowing again.

But in the meantime, the snow and the cold this year remind me of the weather when I was much younger.

In the 1950’s my parents used to drive to Traverse City to spend Christmas with my grandfather. In those days before expressways, it took around nine hours in the old green Buick, with my father driving much too fast – according to my mother. The perpendicular snow banks on either side of the road were six or seven feet high, cut by the enormous rotary plows of the day. Where the wind had cleared the road you could see the bare black telephone poles marching off in the white, featureless distance.

We would drive carefully when we got to Traverse City, because the snow banks on the side of the streets were so high you couldn’t see the cars coming from the side. People would put bright red banners on the tops of their radio aerials to mark their location.

My grandfather, a methodical man, would carefully sweep the steps and sidewalk going up to his big old house on Sixth Street whenever it snowed. Mornings, he would walk to his office downtown, always stopping at the same streetlight in the snowy cold and dark. He’s look up at the light, sneeze three times, and continue his march. My mother’s parents lived for a time in Houghton, just at the base of the Keweenaw Peninsula in the Upper Peninsula.

I remember a winter picture of their house: The snow in front was so high that the only way you could exit was to step out of the bedroom window on the second floor!

When I was growing up, my father had a 1939 Ford, not a great car in the snow. He’d laboriously put heavy, clumsy chains on the rear wheels, and when he came home, I could hear the “clunk, clunk” as he came up the driveway.

He liked the cold, though, and one winter he built an iceboat, a big sloop-rigged craft on three sharp runners that could go faster than the wind when the ice on the neighborhood lake was smooth. Sounds fun – until the day he tipped over and went sprawling hundreds of feet across the ice before we could get him on his feet.

When I graduated from college in 1962, I got a job as sports editor of the paper in Fairbanks, Alaska. The coldest it got when I was there was 65 below zero and the whole city was in covered with near-whiteout from the ice fog, but that was rare.

You’d put “head bolt heaters” in the oil pan of your car to keep the oil from freezing, and when you’d start out driving, the tires would have frozen flat spots until they warmed up.

Like everybody else, after a while I got used to the cold. When it got up to 20 below, we’d all go out in our shirtsleeves to do our errands. Christmas time, I went out into the bush to cut a tree when it was around -40. I took a whack at a likely-looking spruce, and all the branches fell off! Every so often, it got warmer in Fairbanks than it was “outside” in what we called the “lower 48.”

I’d write that story for page one of the paper, and we’d all feel good … until it got cold again. The rule was you always took your Mackinaw and boots when you went out in your car. One day, the editor hit a patch of ice on the road and skidded smack into a high drift, so deep that we had to smash out the rear window to climb out. I suppose it was around -35 when we started walking home, and after a while my ears and nose started to hurt.

Then they stopped hurting. Which was not a good sign. When we finally got picked up, the guy said I’d frozen my face. It hurt like hell when I unthawed, and to this day when I’m out in the cold my ears are the first part that starts hurting.

That makes our current “polar vortex” troubles seem mild. But for me this weather triggers all kinds of memories – and I’ll bet I am not alone. I encourage readers of this column to post on Bridge Magazine your own recollections of winter weather. Reading them may help us all feel just a little warmer.