D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
March
2009
The Winter of Their Discontent
Everybody talks about the weather, even when it's lovely here and awful up north.
It felt like spring came early this year, with even some days in January nudging 60 degrees and the skies a brilliant Crayola sky-blue. I found myself debating, "Do I need to start a fire in the fireplace tonight?" and on many late afternoons in what was ostensibly winter my answer was, "Why bother?"
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Oh, we had a few bouts of snow — most of which, happily, we managed to be out of town for. White streaks of snow hid in the shadows and on the north side of mountain slopes for days until consistently balmy temperatures rooted out the last lingering traces of it, like troops clearing a town in house-to-house fighting against the forces of winter. We drove right into the snow once, as Hwy. 90 climbs into the national forest on the way to Lordsburg: Rain turned to sloppy, semi-solid splatters against the windshield, then into full-blown snow that sluiced into icy ruts on the highway, making every hilly turn a threat to take a fatal shortcut. I reached the Love's gas station in Lordsburg still as white-knuckled as I'd ever been in Minnesota blizzards.
And there were a few stretches, maybe three days at a time, where the fireplace worked pretty much nonstop, the fan in the fireplace insert a constant background hum. Mostly, though, this winter was unusually easy on the woodpile. The packrats' precious tucking-aways of goatheads and cactus stems are safe for another year.
All of which made it awkward when folks who live up north would call or email. They'd be waiting out a blizzard, the inches of snow mounting up like digits on the national debt, or hunkering down against temperatures that barely broke zero for weeks on end. They or their neighbors might have lost power as a relentless series of ice storms marched across the country, slathering power lines and downing tree limbs. The lucky ones would be working at home as their office or school shut down under the weight of too much winter.
So what are we supposed to say in the face of all this frigid, snowbound suffering?
You can try to lowball just how gorgeous the weather is down here in southern New Mexico, even in January or February. Not only do you sympathize, according to this tack, but you're sharing in the northerners' suffering: "Yeah, it's been cold here, too. I actually had to put a jacket on yesterday. A windbreaker, really, but still. . . ." "Ice storm? Man, I hear ya. Why, the ice from the cooler for last night's outdoor party still hasn't melted here. Looks like a glacier out by the hot tub."
An extreme variant of this strategy actually tries to outdo the frozen folks by making their torment sound like a blessing: "A foot of snow? Boy, are you lucky. We'd kill for that kind of moisture down here. It's just dry, dry, dry, day after day. These dang blue skies are giving me a headache, I tell ya." "So I suppose once the blizzard blows over you'll have great skiing, huh? My skis are just gathering dust in the garage ever since we moved down from New Hampshire."
It's easy to take this top-that approach too far, however, at which point your well-intentioned sympathy slips into simple cruelty: "Eight below is your high today? Wow, what we couldn't do with some of that cooling. Yesterday I had to turn the air conditioner on just to make the house livable in the afternoon. Why don't you ship some of that sub-zero down to New Mexico, huh, buddy? Buddy. . .?" Click.
After a series of uncomfortable conversations about the weather — it's true what they say, everybody does talk about it — with those poor bastards trapped up north during the winter just past (for us, at least — in Minnesota the ice may not go off the lakes until May), I've come to a difficult conclusion: We need to lie. Those of us lucky enough to live in southern New Mexico (those idiots up in Santa Fe and Albuquerque can keep their snow!) and Arizona and other places where winter is a laugher need to shield the rest of America from this painful truth.
It's for their own good, not to mention ours. Put yourself in their shoes — their ice-caked snowboots, rather. Imagine hearing the unvarnished truth, say, next January when the wind chill (another northern thing, just trust me on this) is minus-40, the snow is horizontal, the icy remains of the blizzard that struck way back on Halloween still clog the streets, and the neighbor's poodle just cracked in half from the cold. To cheer up, you decide to call your cousin Norm in Las Cruces, whom you haven't talked to in ages.
"Hiya, Vern!" he says, much too merrily for January. "How's Minneapolis treating ya?"
You give him the lowdown, trying not to let your voice crack. Hoping your cousin in Las Cruces can't hear your wife in the other room, wailing with horror at the news that schools will be closed for the fourth day in a row. It's the TV, you'll tell Norm if he asks — you know, that show "The View."
Here it comes, then, the unvarnished truth: "Sounds mighty rough, Vern," your cousin replies with genuine sympathy. "Hate to tell ya, but it's 65 degrees and sunny here in Cruces today. Thinkin' of playing golf this afternoon. The kids are out playing softball. They keep bugging me to fill up the swimming pool, but I tell 'em, no, not for another couple weeks."
That's it, the breaking point. A howl of pain and indignation rises from an otherwise peaceful, if snowbound, Minneapolis suburb. It's not the TV, not "The View" — not even "Maury Povich." Suddenly there's a scuffling sound, Norm in Las Cruces thinks he hears the words "key to the frickin' gun cabinet" — and then the phone goes dead.
Lying is the best course for us, too, it goes without saying. Too much truth along the lines of "your winter weather sucks and ours doesn't" might inspire a mass exodus from the frozen north. It's not just that the hordes of refugees from North Dakota and Michigan and other godforsaken places would drive up housing prices, turn traffic into a tangled nightmare and make Mesilla Valley Mall actually crowded. No, we need the northerners to stay where anybody with a lick of sense would flee at the first snowflake. Somebody has to.
Think about it. Bereft of their tax base and core audiences, America's great cultural institutions would topple — the Metropolitan Opera, the Art Institute of Chicago, "Prairie Home Companion," the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Rockettes for gosh sakes. What would the Yankees do without fans? How long would the Green Bay Packers play in an empty stadium, if suddenly people realized that no one in his right mind would willingly live in Green Bay?
As the formerly frozen multitudes fled south and west, the cities left behind would begin to resemble the crumbling New York at the end of Planet of the Apes. (OK, there I just went and ruined it for you. Charlton Heston finds the Statue of Liberty. Sorry.) Imagine a lone shopper, clad in a snowmobile suit, crumpled in the food court of an abandoned Mall of America — frost starting to form on the flume ride in Camp Snoopy: "We finally really did it. You maniacs! Damn you all!" Roll credits. Fade to black.
Everything up north that we enjoy vicariously by way of television and Amazon.com would shrivel up. Soon there would be nothing left — except snow and ice, of course.
So we have to lie. Next winter — by which I mean October, since that's when winter arrives up there — we have to agree to engage in a vast conspiracy. We'll need to buy off the meteorologists nationwide, alter the weather maps in any newspapers still publishing by then. Hack the Internet, alter weather.com And, above all, when anyone from up north calls or emails, lie.
Say it with me now: "It's in the teens here and supposed to snow tomorrow. Haven't seen the sun in weeks. So how're things in Fargo?"
And remember, if a northern caller catches you on your cell phone on the golf course, that five-iron swishing sound is only the wind, blowing in another blizzard from, er, Mexico.
That's our story, and we're sticking to it.
Desert Exposure editor David A. Fryxell sold his snowblower when
he left Cincinnati,
and he vows never to own another one.