Secrets of the City

Living in Minnesota, I realize that every year soon after Halloween there will be snow on the ground and it will be horribly cold every day until about Easter. But as I stood outside my building in my t-shirt, smoking a cigarette and thinking about the summer I thought about how the seasons both compress and draw out time. How distance becomes relative to the weather. And even though we don’t get hurricanes, tsunamis, typhoons, earthquakes, etc. how unpleasant it is to live here in the winter.

I’m torn, however. I know I need the seasons. If I lived in LA or Miami, where it’s sunny and more or less pleasant every day I would be suicidal within a month. But living through the winter is something that cannot be learned, it is inherited. This climate has chased off many a brave soul. A few of my friends live just about two blocks from me. In the summer it seems like a very short distance I have walked to and from their apartment multiple times in one night. But in the winter, with the snow on the ground and the temperature roughly the same as liquid nitrogen it seems impossibly far. I almost feel like I need to drive there and pack an overnight bag. If you don’t grow up like this I can only imagine what a shock to the system it is. Once, when I was in college the wind chill got down to -47. I had to retrieve something from my car, which was about 350 feet from my building, and I honestly thought I might not make it. I’m not joking at all. The weather stretches distances out in a way that I cannot explain. It turns what in the summer would be a near-nothing walk into a death-defying Ernest Shackleton-like survival quest. Though no matter how bad the trip gets, it hardly ever ends with anyone shooting a traveling companion’s pet cat.

The seasons play with time a bit too. During any months that are within the same season everything happens “a few days” or “a few weeks” apart. As soon as those seasons change the things that happened during the previous season happended “a couple months ago”. For example I went up north in early August, but before the first snow fell if you had asked me when I went, it was “a few weeks ago”, now it was “a few months ago”. The only difference is the presence of a little bit of snow on the ground.

There’s something that clicks over in everyone’s (or maybe it’s just my) head the first time it snows and the first nice day in the spring. 50 degrees in March requires shorts. Anything below 65 degrees in August requires a peacoat and Sorels. People forget how to drive in the snow over the summer and there is a multitude of accidents the first snowy morning. When it thaws in the spring every jackass with a crotch rocket deems it necessary to drive 108 mph everywhere they go for about three weeks. I could go on and on but if you live here or are from here you get it. If you are not from here it’s something that cannot be explained. I wouldn’t ever move anywhere without both shorts and a thick winter coat, even if I were moving to Hawaii or Iceland. I don’t know any other way to be. Which is why even though the stretching and compression of time and distance is a strange thing, I could never live without it. If I lived in an area with only one year-round climate I would have to artifically create it somehow. I know it’s 75 in Houston in December but if I lived there I would wear long sleeves all winter. I would wear short sleeves all summer in Edmonton even though it hardly gets above 65 there. I can see why people think we are crazy for living in this state but, conversely, I can’t see how people can live anywhere else.