What's It Like to Live Through a Northern Minnesota Winter?

The Minnesota Stomp and Other Winter Adventures

Photo by Galina N on Unsplash

People sometimes ask how we survive here in Minnesota when 30 below days are considered routine each year. (I've seen 42 below twice since living here.) I began thinking I should do a blog post about the lined pants, choppers, snowmobile boots and parkas we wear. Then Susie suggested that instead I do a post about some of our rituals, which outsiders will no doubt consider unusual. Here's some of what we came up with.

1. Climbing up to the roof with boiling hot water in a teapot.
This is probably something you've never had to deal with where you live. I've twice had to go up on roof with a teapot of boiling hot water to pour down the exhaust pipe so that the toilet flushes properly. It seems weird, but after trying to clear the toilet with a snake a friend of mine suggested this and --Voila! --it worked.

2. Heating a key with a match to unlock the trunk
Last week I heated up a key with a match so I could open the lock on my wife's trunk. (Her key wouldn't turn. I didn't know where the de-icer was.)

3. The Minnesota Stomp
If you live in Minnesota you'll notice this unusual ritual. When there's snow on the ground, people have learned to stomp their feet when they walk into the house, to get the snow off their boots. If several people arrive at the same time to a party they will all be stomping there in the foyer. Eventually we leave our shoes by the door and head into the house. We do this for about six months.

4. Warm your hands inside your jacket under your arm pits. 
My brother-in-law Lloyd, who lives in Thailand, sent this one and the following. "I tell my students some of these things and I don't think they believe me."

5. In the Old Days
My father-in-law and his brother (Lloyd's dad and uncle) owned a plot of land in Payne where they would go to fell lumber for the woodstoves. Sometimes the temperatures dropped to 40, 50 and even 60 below and they were in the middle of nowhere. Lloyd shared this and the next as well.)

I once asked Dad how they used to get the truck started in really cold winter weather, up at Payne, where there was no electricity, no battery charger, no telephone, no nothing, and the truck had a 6-volt battery that barely turned the engine over even under the best of conditions.

First thing they did when they arrived was to take the truck battery into the shack and put it pretty close to the wood stove. They drained both the radiator fluid and the oil, and brought those into the shack, too. When it came time to leave, they'd put the oil back in first, then the radiator fluid, and the battery last. Then hoped to God it would start.

If it's not quite so cold and your electric engine heater isn't working, you can just warm up the oil pan  by putting some coals from the wood stove (or glowing charcoal) in a shallow pan, and shove it under the engine pan for about 15 minutes. I used that method more than once, and it works well.

You can also heat the oil pan with newspaper soaked in used motor oil and lit with a match, but that of course has flames. If it's necessary to use the newspaper method, Dad told me to put the newspaper on a steel snow shovel, so it could be pulled out quickly, if necessary. I don't think I ever did it that way, because I always had coals in the wood-stove.

6. How to Start an Old Tractor 

Obviously not the tractor referenced in this story, though a Farmall H

And here's how I used to start and run the old Farmall H in winter, before Albie Gorder helped me put a newer engine in it that could handle an electric starter. (Grandpa Hoad's 1942 Farmall H was a war model, and that's why it had steel wheels and a special fly-wheel that you couldn't use an electric starter with even if you had an electric starter.)

I've used this method more than once. You can ask Harrold (our brother-in-law). He was with me when we drove the tractor back and forth up and down the hill on the Birch Point Road, with the radiator shrouded in blankets in weather well below zero. Lloyd wrote this years ago ...

How to start a Farmall H with a hand crank, and a leaky radiator and cracked block so you've got to run water in it instead of antifreeze, when it's 30 below zero:

1. Put 2 five gallon pails of water on the wood-stove the night before.
2. When you get up in the morning, take the water off the stove and let it cool until you can stick your hand in it for 5 seconds without cooking it.
3. When you're coffeed up and got your boots, three jackets, two hats, and mitts on, take the two pails of water out to the tractor. Try not to spill any in your boots.
4. Jam the clutch pedal in with a stick, so you won't have to try to turn the whole gear box over when you crank the engine, because that 90 weight is thicker than molasses in January, and you WON'T be able to turn it over, even if you try.
5. Pour the first pail of water into the radiator with the radiator and block drain plugs removed, so the water just runs through onto the snow. That will pre-warm the block a little.
5. Quickly find the whittled wooden plugs in the snow under the seat of the tractor, and tap them into the long-ago stripped holes in the bottom of the radiator and the side of the cracked block.
6. Pour the second bucket of hot water into the radiator.
7. Set the choke to full, and the throttle to half (or a little more).
8. Crank her over a half a turn, slowly, so it DOESN'T fire, until gas is squirting out of the carburetor.
9. Set the choke to 2/3 full.
10. Crank her over fast this time, and hope to God it starts.
11. If it doesn't fire at all, it's probably because you forgot to pull the kill switch out. Do that quickly, then repeat steps 8 through 10.
12. If it fires, but doesn't start, repeat steps 8 through 10.
13. If it doesn't start in about 3 tries, get the water out of it QUICK, or you'll crack the block even worse. Then go back in the house and start over at step one, and cut your wood the next day instead of today.
14. If it does start, hang three blankets over the front cowling of the tractor to keep the fan from sucking cold air in and freezing your radiator.
15. When she's warmed up a good half an hour, (you can go in and have some coffee while doing that), take the stick off the clutch pedal, and verrrry slowly let the clutch out until you get the gear box turning. Then give that about 10 minutes to warm up before you try putting your belt pulley in gear to turn the saw rig. (If there's snow or ice on the pulley, you make a torch out of a twisted up sheet of newspaper and melt it off so your belt will stay on.)
16. Once you've got everything spinning, you can run her all day that way. You don't shut her down at noon, of course.

* * * *

That's just one of the luxuries of being your own boss in Northern Minnesota.

For the record, this is the part of the country where young Bobby Zimmerman grew up.

Wordless Wednesday: First Signs of Winter

Virtual Snow

Too bad it's not virtual snow. Then I could use virtual money to buy a large, new virtual snowblower.

Old Man Winter let us know that he hasn't forgotten us. Fortunately the worst of it passed us by. Based on forecasts the past two days I'd been worried that tonight I would not be able to get home from work. Whew!

Tonight, while deciding what to write about here my bro' from Pennsylvania called. As we briefly skimmed across a topics we came to this one, and I pass it on for your entertainment.

Essentially, the U.S. Mint introduced a program in which enabled people to get Frequent Flyer miles by buying U.S. coins. Because there were no shipping costs, people could buy the coins with credit cards that offered rewards, take them straight to the bank and pay off those cards with the cash. Net net: the more coins they got, the more Frequent Flyer perks.

The Wall Street Journal article relays a number of stories about clever citizens who took advantage of this crack in the system including one man who took his wife to Tahiti for a two week vacation in October.

I don't fully understand the economics of it, though. It costs the government money (taxpayer dollars) to ship the coins, so it is a loss to the Mint any way you look at it. Even if the U.S. Postal Service waived the charges for shipping the coins, someone is paying for the fuel to make the delivery. It's all pretty weird to me. It's a virtual snowjob. Now where's that virtual snowblower when you need it?

Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow this week

"Hear Ye Hear Ye
On Gobbler's Knob this glorious Groundhog Day, February 2nd, 2009
Punxsutawney Phil, Seer of Seers, Prognosticator of all Prognosticators..." saw his shadow, thus predicting six more weeks of winter.

If you don't know the story, you can Google it, of course. The essence is this: in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, the official home of Phil the groundhog, there is a celebration every year regarding this purportedly Celtic tradition of determining the arrival of spring based on a groundhog's shadow. Punxsutawneyians have been conducting the ritual since 1887. You might say it's a great excuse for a party. And I am guessing one of the major events there for filling hotel rooms. (Here in Duluth we have Grandma's marathon, for example.)

A few stats you've probably always wanted to know about these furry critters:

All groundhogs have 22 teeth.
Groundhogs hibernate one to a burrow, with at least two doorways.
Males emerge earlier than females each spring.
Groundhogs can lose 50 per cent of their body weight in hibernation. Their maximum size is 10 kilograms.
They can both swim and climb trees, and have a top speed of 15 kilometres an hour.
Groundhog Day is halfway between the winter solstice and spring equinox.

My favorite part about the occasion is that one of my favorite movies of all time is based on this ritual celebration. You can read all the reviews at imdb.com, but these excerpts from one reviewer capture the essence of why Groundhog Day, the film, is on my top ten list.

Author: kylopod from Baltimore, MD
Even the funniest movies eventually stop making me laugh after I've watched them enough times that the humor no longer surprises me. A joke never has the same effect when you know the punch line in advance. But every once in a blue moon, a comedy comes along that is so thoughtful and meaningful in addition to being funny that after seeing it a dozen times and laughing less often, I start noticing its depth and insight. For me, no movie has so perfectly united hilarity with profundity as "Groundhog Day," which happens to be my favorite movie of all time.

Superficially, this film belongs roughly in the same genre as "All of Me" and "Liar Liar," comedies in which a character becomes the victim of some weird supernatural fate and must adapt to the insane logic of the situation. But Steve Martin and Jim Carrey are geniuses of physical comedy, whereas Bill Murray specializes in understatement. I can't imagine any other approach having worked for this film, where the world is going crazy around Phil the weatherman, Murray's hard-edged character who keeps his emotions bottled up. What makes the initial scenes in which he first discovers his fate so hilarious is the mounting panic in his demeanor even as he tries to act like everything's normal. All he can think of to say is, "I may be having a problem." Uh, no kidding. Throughout the rest of the film, he'll deliver similarly muted lines to describe his situation, like "My years are not advancing as fast as you might think." It's striking that a man who has all the time in the world would choose his words so carefully, but it reflects a well-conceived screenplay.

In this comedy, the laughs are reinforced by repetition. The absurdity of Phil discovering that he's repeating the same day is funny enough, but every time that alarm clock goes off, and the radio starts playing, "I Got You Babe," and Phil goes through the same motions and meets the same people and then goes out into the street to be accosted by the same annoying high school buddy ("Phiiiil?"), I laugh again because I'm reminded how funny it was the first time around. People who didn't like this film (I've met one or two) emphasize how annoying it is that everything gets repeated. I sort of understand that complaint, since jokes repeated over and over usually fail miserably. "Groundhog Day," however, works uniquely well because the situation gets increasingly absurd and Phil gets increasingly desperate with each day that fails to pass....

Though this film has a serious message, it is still quintessentially a comedy. But it's a comedy that uses psychological exploration of a fascinating character to make its point. After the laughter has worn down, "Groundhog Day" turns out to be one of the richest and deepest films I've ever seen.

That being said, this week's forecast from Punxsutawney is for six more weeks of winter. What the Wall Street Journal wants Phil to tell us, however, is how many more weeks of recession we're going to see. The answer to that will probably come from some monkey on CNN.