Saturday, March 10, 2018

Spring Feverish

We went to MN Monthly's Food & Wine Experience at Target Field last Sunday.  It was a beautiful, sunny March afternoon at the ballpark, tasting local wines and brews alongside samplings from well-known restaurants in town and thinking of the upcoming Twins season, followed Monday by six inches of frozen precipitation.  I say precipitation because in March we don't have snowstorms.  We have multi-precipitory events.  It started overnight with standard sleet, laying a slick base layer of ice under everything to come.  Then, throughout most of the day what was primarily falling is technically called Graupel.  It is a horror.  Half snow, half hail, it is essentially tiny hardened snow pellets that pebble the ice layer previously laid down.  After this it went dry for a couple hours while the temperature dropped, followed by the main event, four more inches of crisp powder over the top of the pebbled ice layer.  I'm currently looking at my tomato seeds and experiencing some spring fever.  Springtime in Minnesota is essentially a game of chicken.  It's looking really good for an early thaw and you're putting your coats and boots away for the season and the next morning you wake up to seven inches of snow on your car.  And just when you're ready to end it all and drive into the Mississippi, you come home after work to see the crocuses are finally peaking out of the boulevard garden.
Minnesota is a spectacular place to live.  We have the longest summer days but we pay for them with cold and snowy winters that will test anyone’s resolve.  Minnesota is physically a large enough state to have a geographic optimism gap, too:  The southern and western portions of the state rely mainly on farming the land, and coaxing nutrients out of it, to provide both income and sustenance.  The northern and eastern parts rely heavily on mining the land, and selling what they take out of it, to get their incomes.  In northern Minnesota they know that eventually they’ll wake up and all the iron will be gone.  All they’ll have left is some glacial soil too rusty and sandy to grow anything in.  In the south it’s different – they plant crops in their loamy soil every time the frost goes away, and even if they have a bad year, there will be some harvest, sparse or lush.
I am of northern descent.  While I am a mildly successful home gardener, I still originate from that fatalistic stock of Midwesterners who know how finite their fortunes are.  The first time my cousin took me out into the forty acres of woods behind my grandmother’s house she told me a story about the Windigo and snuck away to leave me to find my own way back to the house.  I was eight, and it was January.  It gets dark at four-thirty in January in northern Minnesota.  In short, I was raised knowing this land (or something in it or inherent to it) will eventually kill me.  Like the aforementioned cold and/or snow.
But that’s the price we pay for our ridiculous quality of life in the upper midwest.  Whenever we sit in an inner tube in the middle of a lake drinking a mimosa in sunglasses on the 4th of July weekend with only a half dozen other boats on the lake we have the obligatory moment when we have to imagine that same lake frozen damn near solid in January, covered in blowing snow dunes, and realize how fortunate we are that the winter keeps anything more nefarious than a tent caterpillar from being able to pupate and survive in this place.  This year in fact was the first since 1924 that the overall temperature between Christmas and New Year’s Eve averaged sub-zero Fahrenheit, and they think it may have some impact on our fight against some invasive insects, saving some berries in the garden and some boulevard trees.
So let's talk about cold.  Zero degrees Fahrenheit is cold.  And you may have experienced some extreme cold and think that you know about cold.  You do not.  At zero degrees Fahrenheit we have to bring our beers in from the porch or they’ll freeze.  Zero degrees Fahrenheit is nothing.  For a solid week in January, the temperature outdoors (in the world your god supposedly made for us), dips as low as -17F (-27C).  This is a temperature few humans know how to behave in.  It does however provide us with a convenient blast chiller adjacent to our kitchen - January is when the best pot pies and other multi-layered savory dishes are prepared, due to our porch being a walk-in freezer for a few weeks.
When it gets brutally cold in the winter many people think that once it gets to a certain point it’s as cold as it can get, or at least as cold as one can perceive.  Once it gets to -2F for instance, it can’t get any colder, and any colder it gets doesn’t register because the body can’t compute that kind of cold.  That is a fallacy.  At -2F you need some serious layering, but with long underpants, an undershirt, some jeans, and a wool sweater, with a fleece or wool vest under your outer coat, and with gloves under mittens, a good hat, and a scarf you should be okay as long as you move your body.  If you’re walking briskly for a few blocks you’ll be fine.  At -17F, it doesn’t matter how many layers you have on - if you’re outdoors for more than a minute or so and you’re not moving you will start to die.  I have felt this sensation waiting for the bus - where my legs, despite three layers of wool, start to go numb in the wind.  My fingers, despite being inside fur-lined leather gloves, will begin to ache if they’re not also in a second layer (coat pockets or mittens). I honestly don’t know how bears and other hibernating animals do it…
We’ve gotten spoiled in recent years with mild winters, and I can only assume it’s because all eyes were on our Super Bowl this year that real, honest to god, frost-your-nuts winter has returned to us.  But I recall winters from my youth where it wouldn’t get above 0F for five or six days at a time.  I remember a Christmas in my mother’s hometown of Eveleth when everyone was at a Christmas Eve church service, and I was at the house alone and I went out for a smoke in -30F (that’s -35C for our worldly friends), and I was so addicted that I put on three separate pairs of gloves so I could stay out there and smoke a whole cigarette.  I should probably take this opportunity to apologize to my aunts, since I’m pretty sure one of them came back to find their gloves reeking of cigarette smoke that Christmas.
I honestly have been amazed in the nadir of winter crossing I-94 into downtown on the bus and I know it's -15F outside because I just waited in that cold for the bus to come (my beard is probably just getting thawed by now), and it's dark, but there's still a heavy stream of headlights coming out of the Lowry Hill Tunnel and tail lights going in, and life continues unimpeded by this ridiculous obstacle of cold that's been set before us at six or seven in the morning.  Minnesotans seem impervious to the cold that winter throws at us.  This is just where we live, and we'll work through the winter in order to see the Twins win a bunch of games next summer only to choke in August yet again, because that's what we do, goddamnit!  Even if we're not baseball fans, but just gardeners with weak tomato yields, this is still our ritual - crippling cold, then guarded optimism, then mild disappointment.  It's the Minnesota way.
So let's talk about snow.  If you live in Minnesota you can expect to push a stranger's car out of a snowbank approximately once per winter.  If you're doing winter right, you'll only be on the receiving end of that charity once every six or so years.  I'm going on seven winters myself, and feeling pretty good about it (I can't believe this was already seven years ago!)...  This year wasn't too bad until after the holidays, but some Monday in January we had our first real Roads Are Useless snowfall in a few winters, reminding us that winter can end us whenever it feels the whim, and I found myself driving home through ten inches of fresh powder.  I followed a trio of plows out Olson Memorial Highway, but as soon as I turned on Penn Ave I knew it was going to take some luck to get all the way home.  The car right in front of me kept skidding off to the right, but pulled back into the traffic ruts every time.  It took a while, but we got up to my neighborhood.
When I finally turned on 35th Ave, there was a white car at the alley hung perpendicularly across the entire drivable road.  The driver got out and put floor mats under the back tires (of course it was rear-wheel drive), and after she got back in they were still going nowhere.  So I turned off my car and got out, and two other neighbors coming from the other direction came over to help, and we gave her a shove backwards into the alley so she could then angle out with our help into a parallel spot against the curb.
When I got back into my car and drove past her I nearly got hung up myself turning from 35th to go the half-block to my house, but luckily the Malibu has a high enough undercarriage that it soldiered through the snow mess left by evacuating neighbors.  And I was back out after it finally stopped snowing at 11pm because it is way better to shovel and then go to bed than to have to shovel before you go to work.  I dug both cars out, shoveled the walk, and slept like a baby - for five hours until my alarm went off.  In most cities this would begin round two of the "Snow Might Kill You" show, but in MSP?  There was a snow emergency declared, which meant the entire Mpls fleet of plows was out overnight from 9pm to 9am plowing major arterial streets, which is great for my commute downtown.  By the time my wife and I came home after work at least half (the even side) of all non-snow emergency streets were also plowed to the curb.  And by the next morning?  Life moves on - the third day they plow the other (odd numbered) side of lesser streets, and then everything should be able to go back to normal.  And this just happens, several times per winter, whenever more than six inches of snow falls, the city says "parking is weird for three days," and then you just keep going about your business.  But going about you business starts to seem bleak after six months.  That's how the snow demoralizes you.  Prince was not kidding around - it actually snows pretty often in April.  I've seen it snow here as early as mid-October (ask any Minnesotan about the Halloween Blizzard, we all have a story), and I've seen it snow as late as May 5.  And it's not like it snows and goes away either - between those calendar extremes you can sometimes have to navigate through this.  So when those crocuses show up, or when I can get the tomatoes started in the basement, it feels like a remarkable victory against the forces of the Windigo, and I get to spend a few glorious days living in the mind of a Southern Minnesotan, with my eyes on the harvest rather than the eternal frost.