Polar vortex prompts memories of winter's frigid chills

Not everyone moves south to Minneapolis. But that’s what happened when Terry and I relocated from Alaska to Minnesota. I learned real quick — in the first of 15 winters there — that in a raw cold versus wind chill contest I’ll take raw cold. That wind blowing across the Great Plains bores through your bones.

I’m feeling it this week for our daughter and family — and many friends — who are frozen in place in the Minneapolis metro area. Wind chills predicted in the minus 40-50 range.

One winter in Alaska the thermometer hit forty below. We had an old car at the time, and no garage. Terry carted the battery in every night to warm by the wood stove — our only hope of having a running vehicle in the morning.

He retains a vivid memory of another year when minus twenty temps iced Big Lake in October. There were salmon still in the lake — frozen with their dorsal fins poking up from the ice.

That same October I can still see Terry and a couple friends outside splitting wood — their beards white with frost. Nowadays the white doesn’t need any help from the weather.

Another time, in March, we were on snowmachines (Alaska terminology) a hundred miles out along the Iditarod Trail. It was barely above zero when we started home along wide frozen rivers. Temps plunged out there on that ice moving along at a steady pace. It was one cold ride.

The lowest I’ve encountered is fifty below on Barter Island in the Beaufort Sea — part of the Arctic Ocean. Our son-in-law was a police officer in the small Alaskan village of Kaktovik.

I was trying to get a few pictures before my visit ended. The sun — which had been missing for two months — had finally appeared in a blue sky. I bundled up and dashed outside. The problem was I could not operate my camera with gloves on. I pulled them off briefly. And that is all it took. My fingers were so cold so fast I had to run inside and hold them under warm water. It was shocking how quickly it happened.

In Twin Cities this week there will be no kids in school — fewer cars on the road — and people praying their furnace doesn’t quit. And, I imagine, more than a few frozen pipes. Come summer, however, when the air conditioning’s going non-stop and you have to stand beneath a mister to cool off at the zoo, you can bet folks will long for at least a little bit of that Arctic blast back again.

A teaspoon or two.