Monday, December 04, 2006
(8:00 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Snow does not exist
I have a friend who came to CTS this year after living in Florida for nearly her whole life, so this winter has held a lot of firsts for her -- the first time seeing leaves fall from the trees (this seemed weird to me), first time driving home in a snowstorm of world-historical proportions, first time waking up to see the world covered in a blanket of snow, etc.Talking with her about this has highlighted the fact that snow, ice, and bitterly cold weather generally is a total non-issue for me. For many years, in fact, I didn't have a proper winter coat -- I got by with just a leather jacket, a scarf, and a hat, and I would often wear a t-shirt underneath. I was cold, certainly, but it seemed to me to be totally unremarkable.
For this rare gift of cold-weather endurance, I have two factors to thank: the cruelty of my parents and the strange atmosphere of Olivet's dorm culture. Under the first column, we have the fact that from first through eighth grade, I walked to and from school basically every single day. Given that I was living in Michigan at the time, this obviously entailed a lot of snow; and given that I was living in a deteriorating neighborhood, this also entailed walking over a lot of sidewalks that were complete sheets of ice. A fearful and distrustful child , I had a lot of motivation to learn to walk quickly on the ice -- and so even today, I probably walk faster in icy conditions.
That was not enough to allow me to survive sub-arctic conditions in a spring jacket, however. For that, I needed to spend four years at Olivet. The first year in particular was pivotal -- the freshman guys' dorm is very close to the building where most classes were held, meaning that it felt like a "bother" to actually wear a coat while walking to class. (Women did not develop this "toughness" their freshman year since they had to walk approximately twice as far from the freshman girls' dorm to the same building -- though nursing students may be an exception to this, now that I think of it.) Even as we moved progressively further from the center of campus through the course of our Olivet careers, many of us maintained the attitude of regarding a bulky coat, gloves, scarves, etc., as a "hassle."
Finally, I have Olivet to thank for my near-suicidal willingness to drive long distances during snow storms. The "lake effect" is real! I know because I drove through "lake effect" snow (sometimes twice or three times a year), probably four or five consecutive winters -- often driving either a decade-old Geo Metro or a pickup truck in the back of which I had glibly forgotten to put any weight, or a shovel, or (in at least one case) a proper ice scraper.
One particularly awesome trip home involved a severe snow storm, a resulting traffic jam, and being told by a passenger in a neighboring car that my car "was smoking" -- because I had forgotten to put the cap back on after putting oil into the thing, leading to a humorous series of events that culminating in us (of course I had a passenger) periodically stopping to buy more oil until we could find a store that sold the appropriate replacement cap, something that's a little hard to come by in the far southwest regions of Michigan. Also, I didn't have a cell phone at this time, so to call my dad and ask what the hell to do, I had to use the phone card built into one of my credit cards, which charged something like 50 cents a minute.
I've gotten somewhat off-topic here. In fact, now I'm wondering if there was really any snow involved in that last incident at all. Anyway: stay tuned six months from now for the post about how I wait for it to get near-fatally hot before I will turn on the air conditioner and I never wear shorts.
