The weather outside is frightful ... well, for some

I got an e-mail this morning from my friend Rick, who lives in Portland, Maine. If you’ve been keeping up with current events, you know Rick isn’t wearing short sleeves this week.

It was 11:30 p.m. when he was at his computer, typing, and already it was -15 degrees.

I saw reporters local to New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts talking about the weather on CNN before I left work yesterday afternoon. On seeing the residents in Burlington throwing cups of boiling water in the air, where it immediately turned into a powder of ice crystals, one of my co-workers, a Georgia native, simply said, “Amazing. If I were there, I would end up doing that over and over.”

That’s because the type of skin-damaging cold torturing New England and Eastern Canada right now can be fascinating to those of us from the South.

Rarely do we ever bear any sort of similar brunt from winter. I was attending grad school when the barometric pressure reading hit zero and snow drifts measured feet rather than inches across Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia in March 1993, and, two or three years earlier, I was with shopping at a Huntsville, Ala., mall with my parents when the wind chill factor plummeted to 30 below zero during the week before Christmas.

But usually when Southerners talk about their recollections of coldest moments, it has to do with being unprepared. We’re accustomed to our infamous heat and humidity and Januarys so weird that snow flurries can fall one weekend and, by the next, you’re playing a round of 18 with the guys in a windshirt and khakis. That makes it tough to take Old Man Winter seriously.

And that’s what gets you into trouble.

Like the time in November 1993 when I went to Athens, Ga., to watch Auburn play Georgia. I don’t recall exact temperature readings — somewhere below freezing, accompanied by swirling, constant winds — but I do know I’ve never been colder at a football game. Though I had on socks, boots, underwear, jeans, an undershirt, a long-sleeved T-shirt, a sweatshirt, a hooded and down-lined coat and gloves, it wasn’t enough. I needed thermal underwear, especially for my legs, along with thicker socks and some sort of lined hat for my head. I had no one to blame but myself.

Just like in January 2002, when I went to a college hockey game in Halifax, N.S. My ex had tried to warn me how frigid the facility would be, despite the walls and roof, so I put on every different type of clothing I had brought with me to Canada. I never thought to ask if I could borrow more.

I thought I would die. It wasn’t until the third period, when most of my body had gone numb, that I could say I was relatively comfortable.

Which reminds me that it works both ways. The ex’s visit from Canada with a good friend in late April the year before coincided with an unofficial annual celebration in the South: the return of 80 degrees. You climb into a car that’s been sitting in the sun for an hour and don’t even think about switching on the air conditioning.

Sure, you lower a window or two a mile or so down the road — but not before savoring the baked air, exorcising winter from your body for at least seven more months.

So when the three of us returned to my vehicle after wandering around a festival in a small town in North Georgia, I unlocked the doors, jumped into the driver’s seat and shut the door.

I was the only one inside. The two of them had started to get in but quickly retreated, to stand a couple of feet away with their doors open, gasping.

“For Christ’s sake, Steve, get the windows down!” Joe shouted.

“Why?”

“Why?! How can you stand it? It’s like an oven,” he answered.

I shook my head, unable to imagine the warmth in the vehicle as suffocating. “You’d last here, oh, maybe a day in July, if you think this is bad,” I said.

This morning I noticed one of Delta’s deals for this weekend, Boston for $138.

A Sox game at Fenway in a few months? Sounds great.

The Pats-Colts playoff game in Foxboro this Sunday? Have a good time. Just make sure you're wearing your battery-heated socks. I’ll be getting a few pointers on my short game from my dad on the ratty greens at Cloudland on Lookout Mountain in North Alabama, in the shadow of the snowmaker and bunny slope that see action only a few times a year.

Comments

[Chris]

I definitely understand where you're coming from. I grew up in a part of Michigan that constantly got lake effect snow, and even though I now live only 2 1/2 hours away in Indiana, we don't get half as much snow as they get where I grew up. It's funny to see how every time they predict three inches of snow (which happens about half a dozen time every winter), the grocery stores get packed like they've announced an imminent meteor strike.

On the other hand, we vacation every summer on Oak Island (halfway between Myrtle Beach and Wilmington), and I'd be in agony if it weren't for the weapons-grade air conditioning in the house.