December 13, 2000
Weathering winter of discontent
"Now is the winter of our discontent."
Richard, Duke of Gloucestor
The Tragedy of King Richard the Third. Act I, Scene I
Winter, like no other season, tests your inner fortitude. It also tests cold cranking amps in the 12 volt battery under your car's hood.
Author, radio personality, and Minnesota's prodigal son, Garrison Keillor has often said that winter shapes a person's character. No wonder people in Lake Wobegon and northern Michigan become a little more stoic this time of year. It's hard to get overly excited about wrapping up in 10 layers of clothes to shovel 60 feet out to a mailbox full of third class Christmas cheer.
While T.S. Eliot proclaimed April the cruelest month, he obviously never spent December north of the 45th parallel.
No other time of year is there so much tidings of glad joy as we celebrate the approaching holiday season. We run around catching small tabular and columnar ice crystals on our tongues. We even get a little bit misty watching George Bailey discover "It's a Wonderful Life" for the 1,213 time.
However, as we verbally stumbled through the second verse of "Auld Lang Syne" it hits - new year, same old winter. Four more months of flurries, squalls, and snow storms. Suddenly, you yearn for the sweaty-armpit-stained T-shirt-lawn mowing days of July. You try to think warm thoughts but it hardly makes you perspire.
Now there was a time when snow wasn't a dirty word. A time when the falling white stuff was greeted with shouts of joy instead of four-letter grumblings. When you're 7 years old snow is not the root of all winter evil, it is the root word of snowman, snowball and snow fort. It is also the root cause behind the wonderful words: school closings.
Twenty-three years later, however, the innocences of freshly fallen snow has been corrupted by adulthood.
Instead of frolicking about in the white stuff, I'm shoveling a driveway worth of it. Every year I clear a path by hand; too cheap, or too proud to use a snowblower. Somehow I fancy myself a John Henry to my neighbor's eight horsepower Toro. Of course, the folkhero died after digging through to the other side of the mountain first. Perhaps I should change my tune to the hum of a two-cycle engine.
Winter, aside from being a time that tries men's souls, puts the -40 degrees antifreeze to the test. Like so many things in our class-based society, starting a car on a cold winter's day separates the have's with garages and the garageless have not's. Still, in this season of giving, nothing brings people together like the words: "do you have jumper cables?"
In northern Michigan, there is another winter time certainty: white-knuckle-black-ice-turn-the-steering-wheel-with-the-spin winter driving. When it comes to dashing through the snow in a 130 horsepower, fuel-injected sleigh, there is usually very little laughing all the way. Instead, it is the eerie silence of panic followed by the sound of a snow bank swallowing a Subaru whole.
While misery might love company, no one likes a winter time whiner. Sure we might grouse a bit about the wind chill factor, but full-blown complaining is not a warm-blooded mid Westerner trait. We simply, and stoically weather the weather.
Despite meteorological forecasts of snow and sleet, we trudge through another winter of discontent with only a slight grumble. While the days might be shorter, the long months ahead will test inner fortitude and cold cranking amps. Just think warm thoughts and try to perspire a bit.
Grand Traverse Herald editor Garret Leiva can be reached at 933-1416 or e-mail at gleiva@gtherald.com.