Winter is alive in my back yard.
The snow is a foot deep and glistens in the mid-afternoon sunlight the way the sun creates diamonds on lake surfaces in summer. Small trees’ limbs are bare. In one area, fence slats bisect the sun’s rays, casting long shadows with spaces.
This is the type of winter in which we played as children but as adults leave to skiers and snowshoers and Olympians who drive machines that go very fast downhill. It is winter the beautiful. It is almost another species from winter that paralyzes traffic, creates streets too slick to walk on, that blinds pedestrians.
Some people’s distaste for winter runs so fierce that they begin wearing gloves in October, scarves in November and, except for required public appearances, hibernate till spring.
Sometimes I think of winter as God’s way of telling us that it’s not always going to be easy. Into each life a little winter must fall. But winter can be more fun, more intriguing than that, as well. Take that from someone who invested 17 winters in Alaska.
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The coldest temperature I ever encountered was minus-40, walking from the airline terminal in Fairbanks about a block or so to my rental car. I was wearing a simple pair of jeans and I could feel the chill touch my knees within five seconds of stepping outdoors. Another time I was switching planes in Kotzebue, just north of the Arctic Circle, and passengers had to descend a rear staircase instead of walking directly into the terminal. It was minus-37 and I wore no hat or gloves. I felt it.
Yet I actually felt much colder sitting in a tree stand waiting for deer a few autumns ago in Illinois. It was only 40 degrees, but the wind whipped through the branches 20 feet up and I was shivering into hypothermia when we quit for the day.
Despite time spent in Boston, where I grew up, and Syracuse, N.Y., where it never flurries but always dumps snow by the foot, I did not have adequate appreciation for cold when I moved to Alaska. At the breezy finish line of a long-distance snowmachine race on a frozen lake in Willow, I interviewed winners without wearing gloves. My hands hurt so much in the minus-15 temperature (and whatever windchill), I actually cut short my subject saying, “I’m sorry. I have to stop now and go inside.” I ran for the community center.
Another time, a false report of the imminent arrival of the winner kept me waiting at the finish line of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race for more than an hour at minus-25, with a minus-50 windchill. It was nearing 2 a.m. We were holding the newspaper for a few paragraphs and I ran indoors to call the office. My fingers were so frozen I couldn’t dial a push-button phone at first. That was the same Iditarod that race officials invited Hugh O’Brian, who played Wyatt Earp in the old TV show, to present the winner a replica pistol because Wyatt Earp ran a saloon in Gold Rush Nome. O’Brian was in proper Earp attire, meaning he wore a cravat and a thin, black coat. Lord knows how cold he was. I think his lips were frozen shut.
But I am a piker even to mention temperatures like this. Every wilderness homesteader or veteran dog musher has endured much colder. One year it was so cold the late Susan Butcher mushed, minus-75, that she moved her dogs to Willow, where it was only minus-50-something.
Dick Mackey, now in his 70s and partial to deserts in winter, not only won the Iditarod by one second in 1978, he operated the most northerly truck stop in the world in a hamlet called Coldfoot. One winter the temperature hit an American low of minus-82. Mackey said tools shattered like glass if dropped.
When I was still running, I mapped out a mile course one place I lived in Anchorage. I acknowledged that in a given winter I would fall three or four times on ice not seen under snow. Hazard of the game. More than once I also had to detour from the measured route because of bad-news moose. Added a little more spice to the jog.
The best winter travels were in mid-evening, especially under a starry sky. It was frigid and there was need to take care with every step. But for a couple holding hands on a walk it was romantic. Everyone else was in house lockdown and it was as if the empty world belonged just to us. Snow and ice and cold were against us, but at the end of the mile or two, we felt as if we had done something.
And the worthwhile reward was a cup of hot chocolate.
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