Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow ... NOT! (12/11/99)

By Paulette Tobin

James Russell Lowell wrote: "What is so rare as a day in June?" Well, Mr. Lowell, here in Grand Forks, N.D., it would be a day in mid-December that was sunny, 45 degrees and snow-free, and that is just what our December has been so far. I wore a T-shirt to put up the outdoor Christmas lights and ran errands this week in my shirtsleeves. The snow blower is still parked in the corner of the garage and our snow boots remain in storage. In a country where we often mark the passage of time by the number of winters we've seen, and where we name our blizzards so we can remember one from the other, every day like this is a blessing.

Winter is not my favorite time of the year. I am not dreaming of a white Christmas and every time I hear the radio play that stupid song "Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow," I have to fight the urge to rip the appliance out of the wall and stomp on it. Even as a kid, I hated winter, and not just because Mom made me wear six-buckle overshoes when Shirley Joachim, Deloris Dohn, Carmen Opp and all the other girls at Detmold No. 3 country school were wearing those cool snow boots with fur cuffs.

I remember the Christmas programs and the spring music concerts that were postponed or canceled because of blizzards or ice storms. I remember huddling around the oil heater at country school trying to keep warm. Then, when we started going to town school, I remember those cold bus rides, the times we were late because the roads were so bad, and the times our bus driver got the radio message before we even got to school that classes had been canceled for the day. When the weather got that bad, we often lost electrical power out on the farm. That meant no lights, no running water (because the water pump didn't work without electricity) and no central heating. It also meant doing chores in the dark, chopping ice out of the tank and pumping water by hand.

When I got to college, we had blizzard parties when the weather got bad. Somebody always managed to make it to the liquor store. I remember one Easter when we couldn't get back to Eureka because of a blizzard that had missed the southern part of the state. Our friend, Kathy Janssen from Emery, S.D., took pity on Nancy Heupel and me and took us home so we wouldn't have to spend Easter in the dorm. Kathy's parents, both gone now, were so wonderful to us. Emery had it's own version of the Silver Keg (in those days you could drink 3.2 beer if you were 18) and we shut the place down a couple of nights.

In my experience, cold and snow seems to drive a lot of people to drink. Today I can't remember the last time I was in a bar, but I do remember spending a lot of my leisure time at the Cabaret in Fessenden, N.D., during the winters of 1977, 1978 and 1979. I was just out of college working my first job as editor of a weekly newspaper, the Wells County Free Press. I learned a lot about the relationship between cold and snow and alcohol consumption during those years. For instance, I remember a guy I knew who left a bar in Bowdon, N.D., one night in the dead of winter and found his pickup windows iced over. Unfortunately he couldn't find his ice scraper, and his vehicle's defroster wasn't working fast enough, so he removed his dentures and used them to scrape the windshield. Now does this sound like the sort of thing anyone could manage unless he'd had a few drinks first?

Those were incredibly horrible winters. The snow and cold came early in 1977 and then about December 13th we had heavy rain that turned to ice. Half the power poles in North Dakota snapped like twigs. Some farms north of Fessenden were without electrical power for three weeks. The roads were a nightmare, and it was so cold, if the thermometer hit 10 degrees, we considered it a heat wave. For the rest of the winter we had one blizzard after another.

I was 22 and had never spent a Christmas away from home but I knew there was no way I could take the chance of driving alone over 150 miles of treacherous roads in freezing weather. Some friends in Fessenden had invited me to spend Christmas with them, so I put on a brave face and called Mom and Dad to say I wouldn't be coming home. Fifteen minutes after I hung up, Mom called me back to tell me that Dad had just left the farm in the four-wheel drive pick-up and was coming to get me.

It took Dad over six hours to make the three-hour trip between the farm and Fessenden. He stayed overnight with me and we went to a local high school basketball game together. The next day we drove home on some gravel back roads that Dad had decided would be less treacherous than the main highways. I will never forget that drive. The sun was shining brightly on the crusted snow and ice as we drove by mile after mile of broken telephone and electrical poles. There were no signs of life, nor did we meet more than a handful of other vehicles. When it came time for me to return to Fessenden, Norman Stickelmeyer, our neighbor on the farm, flew me back in his four-seater plane.

My mother has told me of winters on the farm in the early 1950s when Dad had to shovel them out of the house in the morning. I remember times in high school when Dad would be out every day with the tractor and loader trying to clear a path before the bus came. Those last winters on the farm there was so much snow frozen so hard, he finally gave up trying to keep the driveway open. He and Mom parked the car out on the gravel road about a quarter mile from the house and walked back and forth to it when they wanted to go somewhere. I remember they worried about running out of fuel oil because they didn't know how the delivery truck would get into the yard.

When I did make it home from North Dakota during that year, I would park out by their car and walk over the top of a 20-foot snow drift, frozen hard as a rock, and then crawl over the corral fences and say hello to the cows and the calves on my way to house. Even Mom, who liked farming way more than Dad did, had just about had it. "What I wouldn't give to hear a car drive into the yard," she used to say to me. I don't think it was a coincidence that they sold out and moved to town in 1979.

Sometimes it seems like bad luck to crow about this mild winter weather. The weather gods are jealous gods and they don't like us to feel like we're getting by with anything. Still I hope they'll take pity on us a while longer. We don't need snow to have a great Christmas.

(Paulette Haupt Tobin grew up on a farm 12 miles north of Eureka. She graduated from EHS in 1973 and from SDSU. Today she is a reporter for the Grand Forks Herald.)