Ticker's Recollections of Winter

As we read this, we smiled.  Ticker lived in Chicago and we lived 90 miles further north.  He suggests--with very good reason--that Upper Midwestern parents should teach their children the lessons learned in this essay.  

He's right, because every word is true.

Here's his prelude:

It got very cold and in some places it snowed.  We used to call this winter before we let people try to tell us that it would never happen again.  Those same people have deliberately ignored the multi-decade oscillations in weather patterns that have been observed for over one hundred years and are well-known.  In fact they ever have the word "oscillator" in their names.

An oscillator goes from one extreme to another on some sort of regular pattern.

 Now for the main course:

...In the late 1970s and early 80s I lived in such a part of the country, near a big lake.  There was no fuel injection; our cars had carburetors. By then we had advanced to the point that the choke was electric and "set" itself when it was cold with a slight press of the pedal.  There was no electric fuel pump; it was driven by the engine.  You got in the car, pumped the pedal so the accelerator pump once or twice to squirt the raw gas in the carb bowl into the intake, pressed it slightly one last time and released to make sure the choke was set and turned the key.  If you did it right for the conditions and your battery was in decent shape the car would start, often firing on two or three cylinders originally and running extremely rough for the first few seconds until the rest of them lit up.  If you got it wrong and flooded it you were screwed as there was insufficient battery power to keep cranking for very long, and if you left a discharged battery out in that cold it was very likely to freeze and split.  Thus if the car failed to start you better either be able to get an immediate jump or have the tools to remove said battery and bring it inside so it wouldn't freeze!

I didn't have a garage; that was a luxury and I had no money.  I was a young man.  I had to park outside.  After said car started you cleared the snow off (frequently a foot deep) and then you had to wait until the engine warmed up enough that you had cabin heat.  Not for yourself; you had on a winter parka and long underwear under your pants but rather for the defroster because if you didn't wait the first time you exhaled your breath would freeze on the INSIDE of the windshield and you couldn't see a damned thing.

Phones were connected with wires and the closest one required a quarter to be deposited in the slot and was probably 10 or more miles away once you got in said car and started driving.  There was a zero chance of you reaching it if you got out in 0F conditions and attempted to hike that; you were dead if you tried that stunt.  If you went off the road and into the piled-high snow, often by February 10' in height on both sides of said road, that had been previously removed from said road by twin-augur snowthrowers on the front of a dump truck filled with sand you'd be lucky if someone realized that hole was made by a car and the car is still in there; there was no way to call for help so your only hope was another vehicle that noticed as if wherever you were going called in your lack of arrival figuring out where you balled it up in those conditions was not going to be easy.  You were quite careful to not have that happen because if it did they'd probably find your dead body in April.  The mailboxes on said roads were hung on tall cantilevered chain rigs that would swing out of the way when hit because otherwise the first time said snow removal device came by it would destroy the mailbox.

You never went anywhere without gloves in the winter months either on your hands or in the car, and you never went anywhere in the winter months without adequate clothing which included a thick knit hat for your head, gloves and emergency supplies in the vehicle, including plenty of blankets or other means of keeping warm (I was a broke young man so a pile of blankets it was; I didn't have money for cold-rated sleeping bag/bivvy sack), a source of minor heat (e.g. a candle and means of lighting it), and a small tin or other similar thing plus a set of road flares so IF you were off the road you could lay a trail TO YOU from the road and increase the odds someone driving by would see it, especially at night -- assuming you could walk between the points, that is, which was by no means reasonably assured as there were no such things as airbags either so if you crashed odds were high you were BADLY hurt.  Why the candle and plenty of matches?  The candle wasn't for heat for you; it was to melt snow in said tin so you could drink it without killing yourself via hypothermia, and the means of keeping warm without energy was so if you had a mechanical breakdown and could not use the engine for heat, or had an extended problem and ran out of gas you didn't die.

You can't change a tire in these sorts of conditions without decent gloves or you will lose fingers to frostbite.  Never mind that all the other "sharps" risk associated with any sort of car work is always there so what are you doing driving around with no means of fixing that.  Oh, you think its cool that modern cars often don't even have spares?  Yeah, that's nice -- what happens if you get a flat and its -10F outside?  This sort of tolerance for a vehicle that is expected to be operated in all seasons is stupid and can get you killed..

Milwaukee and the surrounding 'burbs did not use twin-augur snowblowers to clear the roads; those were used only at Mitchell Field, and watching them in action was awe-inspiring.  And since Milwaukee metro is far more compact than Chicago metro, some of the kit he packed wasn't really necessary here--but it was a good 'want-to-have.' 

But the winters in the mid-'60's and mid-'70's--and to a lesser extent--the mid-'80's were brutal and yes:  these days we are spoiled, and soft.