I’ve dreaded this post. I once said I’m not superstitious about anything but karma, but that’s a lie. Though I’m not entirely sure “speak your dream and kill it” is really a superstition. Live long enough and it starts to look like hard reality.
“What the hell is he babbling about now? Does he ever just get to the frickin’ point?”
Okay, here goes. Deep breath, Joel. You can do this. Damn the consequences:
WINTER IS OFFICIALLY HALF OVER, AND SO FAR IT’S BEEN A BREEZE! (ducks and covers, awaiting the inevitable blizzard)
Readers in Minnesota and Wyoming and Montana are perfectly justified in their contemptuous sneers as Uncle Joel bitches and whines about winter. He lives in the SW desert, and how bad can it be? In truth it’s not THAT bad. I’ve been to the Canadian border in winter, and you can have my share. But the high desert isn’t the Sonoran desert. Overnight temps in single digits are routine here. The drier it is, generally speaking, the colder it is because we’re up above 6000 feet and when the sun goes down the temperature crashes. It may or may not struggle above freezing by the afternoon.
And that used to be a problem for clueless old Uncle Joel, because he lives in the boondocks where you make your own heat or you don’t have any. A few winters ago we had several consecutive nights at ten below or colder and I thought I’d just freeze. I’m from Michigan – I’ve been cold before, but I’ve never been frightened by the cold, know’m’mean?
The central problem has always been that I don’t know what I’m doing, and can’t just give money to someone who does. This is our third winter in the Secret Lair, and the first one was not as big an improvement over the unheated travel trailer as I expected. An improvement, to be sure, but not the quantum leap I hoped for. The insulation wasn’t as good as I expected, and that freebie woodstove turned out to be positively hazardous. But incremental improvements and retrofits seem to have helped us turn a corner, and this winter the Lair is making and retaining heat in an other-than-laughable manner. Most days it’s sinfully comfortable in here after the iron heats up. If I can get the siding on the Lair this year, I expect it to perform like an actual house next winter.
But (here’s where superstition comes in) that’s mostly because the weather has been very cooperative. For weeks it’s been one golden day after another. Cold nights, sure, but still and sunny with afternoons in the forties and even occasional fifties. That big blizzard everybody talked about? We hardly saw a cloud. We had one cold windy day and then it was back to sunny bliss.
Which is good, since my batteries have chosen this unfortunate time to die, and I’ll probably be a while finding replacements. Right now I have power enough for a lightbulb till bedtime, but the situation is deteriorating with dreadful speed. Sunny days are much appreciated.
I consider serious winter as running from December through February. Everything else is prelude and postscript. Sure we’ve had snow into April, but for those three months winter has nasty big pointy teeth. And this weekend we’re halfway through. Uncle Murphy has had his way with me in other matters: That cataract surgery hasn’t gone well, the Jeep has no brakes and the powershed has no batteries. But the weather has been brilliant, and I’d prefer that it remain that way. But whether or not it does, we’re halfway home.
Actually, it’s not been too bad here either. Two nights got below zero, one to -17, but otherwise not serious. My December electric bill, however, is $30. more than it was the year it got down below zero day after day after day… and I redid the weather strip around both doors recently. I don’t put a fire in the wood stove often for two reasons. Wood costs more than electricity here (for now), and if it isn’t seriously cold outside, the wood stove gets too hot pretty quick – and you can’t just have a little bit of fire in an air tight stove.
Murphy is an optimist… you really can’t win. Sorry about that…
“Never been afraid of the cold, you know what I mean?”
Any real outdoorsman does.We all need to learn our lesson once. Some of us even die learning it, as a man from my hometown did just that last year in the canyons over the Snake River.
I spent a night once, as a teenager, in a summertime sleeping bag outside in -6 degree fahrenheit weather. It had come in unexpectedly – the weather report had called for lows int he 40s, but an artcic blast had worked its way in over the Selkirk mountains that afternoon, and I knew I was in for it.
I got up at eleven o clock, shivering uncontrollably and erected the small tent that I had brought along but hadn’t bothered to erect. I didn’t think it would do much – it was a summer time tent, too. But just the task got me moving enough to get some blood flowing. By one o clock, I was seriously considering that i may very well die out there if I didn’t do something drastic, so I got up and worked on getting a fire started. it took bit, but I got it going, despite my shaky fingers, and I spent the rest of the night dozing as close to the fire as I could get.
I’ve been afraid of the cold several times. And it is not a good thing.