If You Lived Here You'd Be Home by Now

by Christopher Ingraham

  The average January low in Red Lake County is 4 below zero, more than 30 degrees colder than D.C. Below-zero double digits are so common as to be unremarkable. Twenty below happens frequently. The mercury’s hit 30 below multiple times in every winter we’ve been here. People from Minnesota don’t actually understand how cold this is. Asking a Minnesotan to describe how cold it gets in January is like asking a fish to describe how wet water is. When I tell a Minnesotan I’m from upstate New York, they automatically assume the winters there are similar. But where I grew up temperatures rarely dipped below zero. In northern Minnesota, however, they can linger there for weeks at a time. In upstate New York, you get big snowfalls but the constant seesawing around freezing means that the snow typically melts completely away before the next storm rolls through. You may remember the epic lake effect snow bands that hit the town of Erie, Pennsylvania, in December 2017, dumping upward of six feet of powder in the span of a few days. According to NOAA satellite records nearly all of it had melted away less than a month later. In northern Minnesota, on the other hand, snow and ice that fall don’t go anywhere—they just keep piling up. October’s snow sticks around until April. Bigger towns like Thief River Falls have to have entire city lots set aside solely for dumping snow in the winter as a matter of necessity. They simply have to cart it off shortly after it falls—if they don’t it’ll keep piling up and eventually overwhelm the roads. By January the back lot of the Legion in Red Lake Falls is a serious contender for highest point in the county, owing to the mountain of snow that gets dumped there. Minnesotans kind of assume that life is like this everywhere north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

  It’s hard to describe what 40 below is like to somebody who’s never felt it. In all honesty you don’t truly understand a northern Minnesota winter until you’ve been through several of them. Our first winter there I would tell people back in Maryland that once it gets below zero it doesn’t really matter what temperature it is—it all just hurts the same. With a couple of winters under my belt I know that this is not true, that there are infinite gradations of cold, and of pain, as you travel deeper below the zero-degree Rubicon.

  Down to about 20 below, things are not so bad, honestly. You don’t want to dawdle on your way out to the car, for instance, but as long as you don’t spend too much time fumbling with your keys at the door you can usually do the things you need to do without the cold causing too much of a bite.

  If it’s above minus 20 it’s not uncommon to see people out and about running errands wearing not so much as a coat. I once saw a dude—it’s always dudes, by the way—in a T-shirt and shorts in the parking lot of the Grand Forks Target when it was 15 below. If you’re just running from a warm house to a warm car to a warm store, it doesn’t make much sense to spend twenty minutes getting all your outdoor gear on, particularly if you have one or more kids to deal with.

  But this all changes once you start going below minus 20. Beyond this point the cold no longer really registers as cold—it’s simply experienced as pain. It burns at first, and then after a few minutes it turns into a dull ache. After a few moments, things simply go numb.

  In the winter of 2018–19 we experienced several days of minus-40 temperatures, the deep, dark place on the thermometer where the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales converge. We don’t actually know, for sure, exactly how cold it got at our house that January. The mercury thermometer on our porch bottomed out at 30 below; when the temperatures plunged below that it shattered. We also had a digital weather station out in the yard, which we found only went down to 40 below. For several hours in the mornings of those coldest days the station simply registered a flat line at minus 40, while the true air temperature plunged even farther below that, to depths unknown and unseen. On one of those days Thief River Falls registered the coldest windchill in the nation, falling somewhere below 70 below.

  When it gets that cold the snow underfoot sounds different if you happen to be walking around outside—the scrunch of a boot on the snow is higher pitched, crunchier, crisper. For much of that stretch of January there was a 100-degree temperature differential between the air in our house and the air outside. Sometimes our doors would get frozen shut. Sometimes they’d get frozen open, jammed by an outcropping of ice. The house could creak and groan in the middle of the night.

  In the midst of all this cold something unprecedented happened: Red Lake Falls schools canceled classes for two days in a row and made the announcement ahead of time. Jason Brumwell, who’s lived here all his life, couldn’t remember anything like it happening before. Snow days here are so rare that the district doesn’t even budget for them, like they do in most schools on the east coast. In Red Lake Falls, every snow day has to be made up later in the year.

  “Red Lake Falls is usually the last one to close, and if they close down you know it’s bad,” my dental hygienist told me in the course of a cleaning that January in Thief River Falls. “Never seen anything like it.”

  According to the old-timers in town, that winter also brought the most snow anyone had seen since the legendary winter of 1996 and 1997, when the heavy snowmelt in the spring caused the Red River to flood the cities of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks, sending muddy water three miles inland from the river and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. By February the town was running out of places to put it—snowbanks six feet tall lined most of Main Street, and most of the town’s front yards were buried under mountains of snow displaced from driveways. At the Purple House we had a twenty-four-inch base layer of snow for most of the winter, with drifts adding several feet more in places.

  One morning as we were getting the kids ready for school I noticed some sunlight shining through the kitchen windows, which was odd because the sun itself was still hidden behind the neighboring houses at that time of year. I went outside and realized the light was coming from an incredibly bright sundog, an optical phenomenon that looks like a false crescent sun appearing on either side of the real thing. The sundog was bright enough that it was casting a warm glow into the house even though the sun itself was still concealed. Driving outside I saw that it wasn’t just sundogs: there was a whole array of pillars, arcs, halos, tangents, and rings accompanying the sun that morning. These strange optical phenomena happen when the light hits ice crystals in the air at a certain angle. They’re usually associated with the poles, but we’re far enough north that we sometimes get dazzling displays of them if the conditions are just right. “Shove that in your natural amenities index, USDA,” I said to myself.

  After two weeks of 20 below, or 40-below lows, a negative 5 feels downright mild. For those of you in milder climates, think of it this way: the difference between 32 degrees above zero and 20 degrees below it is bigger than the difference between 32 and 80. Think of how different those two latter temperatures feel to your skin and you’ll understand how much colder than freezing minus 20 really is. Then try to imagine minus 30, or minus 40.

  It’s fun seeing how your pets cope with this kind of cold. Like humans, different individual animals have different cold tolerance thresholds. We have three cats, two of which regularly go outside. One of them refuses to go out if it’s anywhere below zero. The other—admittedly the dumber of the two—will continue to go out down to about 10 below. At least they have it better than the dog, who has to go out to relieve himself no matter what the temperature is. Starting when the temperatures hit the teens above zero somebody needs to be on hand to keep an eye on him because he’ll try to take a dump on the deck in order to minimize the amount of time he has to spend outside.

  Our Minnesota rabbits, on the other hand, didn’t seem to mind the cold that much. The first summer we had them outside we noticed that one of them started digging maniacally at the ground as soon as nighttime temperatures got below about 50 degrees. He kept at it for all of the late summer and fall. One day Briana came in from outside with a concerned expression on her face. “The rabbits are gone,” she said. I went out and looked. They weren’t in th
e hutch, and they weren’t on the ground outside it, either. Then I noticed the yawning pit that one of them had been digging underneath the hutch. I got a flashlight, stuck my face as close to the hole as I could get it, and tried to locate the bottom. As far as I could tell there wasn’t any. I was about to yell back to the house when one of them popped his head around a corner, glaring at the light. They had been smart enough to construct a massive underground burrow of quite literally unfathomable depth before the cold set in.

  On the really cold winter mornings the rabbits would be sequestered in their burrow, only emerging when the sun wheeled around the house to shine on their hutch. They happily foraged for their food beneath the snow, and simply took to eating the snow to satisfy their need for water. We would offer them warm water in dishes but they refused. They were happy with the cold.

  Unfortunately only one of the rabbits made it all the way through the winter, but not due to the cold. One day in March I didn’t latch the top of the enclosure shut as well as I should have. At some point the next morning I looked out the window to see a large animal curled up inside. I ran over to find it was a stray dog. On the ground in front of him lay the body of the white rabbit, its head missing. The brown rabbit, Bubba, sat close by under the hutch looking displeased. I wrangled the dog out of the enclosure, stuck it in our garage, and called the sheriff’s office to come pick it up. Thus our cursed luck with rabbits continued into 2018.

  Northern Minnesotans take a surprisingly lackadaisical attitude toward clearing the roads of snow. In Maryland, for instance, the slightest chance of flurries was met with the full force of the state’s plow fleet, which would be out dumping salt and spraying treatment on the roads hours before the first flakes fell. It wasn’t uncommon for the salt to be piled up higher than the snow for any particular storm. Not that that did much to prevent accidents—Maryland drivers are by far the worst I’ve ever encountered anywhere in the nation. Two classic Maryland driver moves include trying to inch from the right turn to the left turn lane at a stop light, regardless of how many lanes are in between, and missing your highway exit, pulling over to the shoulder, and backing up all the way to your turnoff and into oncoming traffic. Maryland drivers were especially bad during the winter. At a busy Baltimore intersection if you simply roll down your window and whisper the word “snow” every car around you will spontaneously burst into flames.

  Not in Minnesota. For starters only the main arteries—the state and U.S. routes—ever seem to get completely cleared down to the pavement during the winter. The country roads and the surface roads in town do get plowed, but the plows always leave a generous layer of packed ice and snow behind. Over time this layer accumulates. On account of the frigid cold it never melts, so it never gets slippery. It’s surprisingly safe to drive on at typical town speeds.

  If you drive around a residential neighborhood in northern Minnesota in the winter you’ll notice a lot of cars with extension cords running from somewhere under the hood back to the house. Those are for the engine block heaters Minnesotans use to ensure their cars will start in the morning after a night of 20-below temperatures.

  Residential snow removal is an entirely different story. Rule of thumb: if it has wheels on it, in the winter it’ll have a plow attached. I’ve seen plows stuck on pickup trucks, of course. SUVs. Compact cars. ATVs. A golf cart. Every home owner has a different preferred method of snow removal. People who hire professional removal companies to clear their driveways are regarded with gentle pity. The sight of a hired plow guy in a person’s driveway is viewed as a sign that that person is in ill health or is otherwise having trouble managing their own affairs, a signal to neighbors to bring over an extra hot dish to help them make it through the rough patch. Since our driveway is rather long we hired a plow guy for that first winter. We couldn’t understand why, shortly after, so many people started showing up at the door with food.

  The home of our neighbors Rob and Alice sits atop a fiercely sloped hill across the street from us. Over the course of their years there they have developed the most exacting snow removal protocol I’ve ever witnessed. You can tell right away that they’re pros: when working outside in the winter they wear the type of full-body snowsuits that I had previously associated with Antarctic exploration. At the first sign of snow one of them is out on the driveway. They don’t use a regular shovel, oh no. They have one of those giant snow pushers with the white blade, basically a human-powered snowplow on a stick. They meticulously push the snow off the driveway, working from the top down. They push the snow all the way to the edge of the driveway, onto where the grass would be, so that the pavement is completely unobstructed. When they get to road level they push a wide berm of snow away from the mouth of the driveway on either side so that the town plow doesn’t plow much any of it back up when it goes by. If there’s a big snowstorm they’ll be out there at it multiple times in one day. The driveway is always immaculate immediately after the snow stops falling.

  Residential sidewalk snow removal is a bewildering social game clad like an onion in layers of passive aggression. Similar to hiring a plow guy, letting a neighbor shovel your walk is a sign that either you have abdicated your responsibilities as a home owner, or that someone in your household has died. However, you can’t just go charging out to shovel first thing in the morning: if you do you can feel the eyes of your neighbors burning holes through your parka as they peer disapprovingly out their windows. “What the hell’s the new guy doing shoveling at seven o’clock in the morning?” you can feel them muttering to each other. “He think he’s better than the rest of us?” Ideally everyone in a neighborhood would step out of their door to shovel at precisely the same time, thus avoiding any embarrassing misunderstandings. But it rarely works out that way. As a Minneapolis resident put it to me on Twitter one day: “First winter after buying our house, my neighbor would be out shoveling *my* sidewalk at the start of storms before hardly any snow had fallen. So I had to start going out earlier and earlier to beat him to it and now I do his walk at 5am.”

  There are unspoken, deeply held norms regarding how people are expected to make small talk about the winter. At the start of that first winter, as temperatures dipped down into the teens, I was eager to demonstrate that I was tough and the cold didn’t bother me. “You know it’s not as cold as I expected,” I’d say to people at the store. I’d get raised eyebrows and looks of disgust. “Uffda, it’s freezing out there,” they’d say. “Unseasonable. Colder than it should be.” They’d wrap their coats tight and hurry away. To a Minnesotan, there’s no better way to prove you’re a soft-headed idiot than to offer an inaccurate subjective assessment of the weather.

  What I came to learn was that it’s expected and even encouraged to piss and moan about the temperature in November and December, when the cold first starts to creep in. But when the holidays are over and midwinter’s deep freeze sets in, there is only one acceptable thing to say about the weather, no matter how cold it gets: “It’s not so bad out there.” You hear this all the time in January during the long stretches of below-zero weather.

  “Car wouldn’t start but it’s not so bad out there.”

  “Front door froze shut but it’s not so bad out there.”

  “Well, the water main froze in the Hollow again. Kind of a surprise since it’s not so bad out there.”

  Older Minnesotans are particularly aggressive in their deployment of “not so bad out there.” I believe this is because Minnesota families know that when grandpa starts to complain about the January cold, it’s a cry for help, a sign he’s no longer able to care for himself, time to put him in a home.

  The thing you have to understand about “it’s not so bad out there” is that once you say it often enough you start to believe it. In that respect you can think of it as a survival mechanism: it normalizes the unfathomable, endless bitter cold, shrinks it down to something manageable, turns it into a linguistic nicety along the lines of a “you betcha” or an “oh yah.” You have to d
o this because what’s the alternative? The alternative is what Jeremy Renner’s character says about 20-below temperatures in the movie Wind River: “You breathe that cold air deep in your lungs . . . it’ll freeze ’em. Lungs fill up with blood, you start coughing it up.” Every winter day in northern Minnesota people are presented with a choice: they can let the cold air burst their lungs, or they can tell themselves it’s not so bad out and go about their business. They choose the latter.

  Minnesotans survive the cold, dark, endless winters partly on the basis of this stubborn force of will. But another factor is that they simply keep themselves busy. There are an awful lot of snowmobiles out here, for instance, which makes sense since the Arctic Cat plant is just twenty miles away in Thief River Falls. The frigid climate means that northern Minnesota is one of the few places in the United States where you’re guaranteed to be able to snowmobile all winter long once it starts snowing. Snowmobile clubs maintain a huge network of trails on public and private land up here, running down roadsides and through fields and woods. In the winter you frequently see snowmobiles parked outside the bar or the grocery store—people use them to run errands and get around just as they would a car. Minnesotans have the highest number of registered snowmobiles in any state. In any given year a dozen or so Minnesota snowmobilers end up falling through lake ice or crashing into a tree or otherwise killing themselves, but it’s a point of state pride that the snowmobile fatality rate here is lower than in neighboring rival Wisconsin. We managed to get the twins out snowmobiling the first winter, at the Brumwells’ campground. Charles loved it—he made the Brumwells’ nephew Preston drive him on endless loops around the property until his cheeks started getting frostbitten and we had to drag him inside.