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My mother, who lives in North Dakota, emailed me recently:
…there is a winter storm and we have been under Arctic spell for several days now and will continue to X’mas day (windchill -30 F and + everyday)…
-30 F converts to -34 C, for you Europeans. Gothenburg, SE, and Bergen, NO currently enjoy temperatures at least 30 degrees higher on both scales. This is a whole another level of cold. When I left New York to visit my parents, the temperature there was around zero C. That’s cold, but manageable. It mostly just makes one stiff.
Go into the negatives, though, and the cold becomes hostile. When I stepped off the plane in North Dakota, the cold felt like shards. It was sharp and penetrating. My face felt headed for freezer burn. I resolved not to leave the house for the next two weeks. Today, when my mother returned from the grocery store – she is tougher than I am – she opened the door, and I felt glassy spears of cold stream in. My mother, who is pushing 60, wore a big smile. She said, “It’s much warmer today than I thought it would be!”
Darkthrone – Too Old, Too Cold
This is all peanuts compared to the South Pole. My friend Brad works there as a scientist. Evidently, one South Pole tradition is the 300 Club, in which one sits in a 200 F sauna, then runs outside in -100 F weather. You can read about it and see pictures here and here.
anyplace that you can throw water in the air and it freezes before hitting the ground….not fit for human living.
I’d much rather take the occasional California earthquake than way-sub-freezing North Dakotan temperature. Especially since my tiny apartment with a broken DVD player is no place to be for two weeks straight. I really feel for the pizza delivery guy in your mom’s town, Cosmo.
Etan, you don’t know the half of it. There was a car accident yesterday (driving on ice is treacherous), and a police officer stood outside for hours directing traffic.
I’m guessing that turning down the thermostat and just wearing lots of sweaters isn’t an option in North Dakota. Talk about seriously having guts.
Norway should just exile Varg to the South Pole, then he’d write a Burzum album about kvlt and gr1mm Viking penguins.
Up here in Edmonton, we had a minus 50 Celcius weeks last year.
What’s wrong with cold? You just wear more clothes.
Jesus salad tossing Christ what a bunch of pansies…
I live in Central Canada, and we’ve got, at times, -50 weather with the windchill. And keep in mind, you’ve gotta be able to function like you do in the summer–go to work, do the regular things you do (asides from maybe going to the beach….or).
It’s good for creativity. I always have the best creativity in winter, because it is fucking BORING as hell….you’re trapped inside, basically hibernating, and you can’t sleep all winter like bears do.
Right now, i’m doing other songs and other mixes, doing art, and reading Hawking’s black holes book. If you don’t find something interesting to do, you become bored about being bored and finally motivate yourself to actually get something done. Because it is certainly easy to not want to even get out of bed most mornings when the morning before, you’ve just had a shower, and then have to face the enduring cold.
It’s the winds that are a real killer. It’s a dry cold, and the wind goes right through you. Honestly, I don’t know why anyone would have stayed after the first winter…..strength in numbers? Hah. It reminds me of that movie, The March of the Penguins, when Morgan Freeman asks, “we’re not quite sure why they stayed. Stupidity?”.
If you factor in the average homeless person, what goes through that movie is insanely close to home….the reaction to being inside and being bored is preferable to having to stay alive when you get frostbite in a couple of minutes and could die quickly if you don’t run for the heated places. The people on the streets are literally clawing for survival each and every day when you get a -30, -40, -50 temperature.
And then factor in the lack of light–when I go to work in the morning in the winter, it’s dark out, and I go home around sunset, and it’s dark by the time I get home. It’s easier to make mood music, simply because one’s mood is inherently dark until they decide to be proactive and laugh more and stave off the boredom and depression that can otherwise seep into too much of the daily winter life.
And then there’s the winter activities–skating/ hockey, snowmobiling, etc…..taking the bull by the horns, so to speak. I remember hockey as a kid, just playing shinny at ice rinks, being one of my most looked forward to things in winter, because all my friends would be there, it would be a hangout because we were all bored as shit and hockey was a great way to stay active and really–above all–have fun!
You have to get more inventive. Such is life in the cold Canadian Shield when, ironically, there’s really nothing to shield you from those harsh winters.