What's with this winter anyway?

The Column: 03.15.23

I come from pot roast people and the past two months have been rough on me, when, doing penance for the holidays, we’ve been on a bunny rabbit diet, grazing on bowls of greenery. My mother made pot roast for Sunday dinner, which made me think of it as sacred food. She put chuck roast in a covered pan in the oven at low heat when we left for church and when we returned four hours later, the kitchen was redolent with goodness. I don’t recall that she ever tossed a salad. Cows ate salads so whatever good was in them came to us by way of beef.

Urbanites are in flight from their pot roast heritage unless it’s called “pot-au-feu,” which is the same thing — cheap beef cooked slowly — but served by someone with an accent.

It’s winter food, and this has been the weirdest winter in memory, January one day, April the next, snow falling and soon melting, and lakes in Minnesota have not frozen so and ice-fishing shacks have remained on shore.

It’s depressing. We northern people are stoics, and our stoicism is severely challenged by this crazy winter.

(When I was a boy we had real winter and we walked to school, which was never canceled even if the building was not visible in the blizzard. We entered the school building under six-foot icicles weighing upward of a hundred pounds, the result of poor insulation, icicles that, had the child ahead of me slammed the door, could’ve split my skull in two and disfigured the rest of me, making it necessary to bury me in a closed coffin — my cold lifeless hands holding a tribute from my classmates, “He was a good boy who always took turns and never pushed. He was one of the best at coloring maps. He was the best speller in the class. And in Scouts, he tied the best bowline hitch of anybody in Troop 209.” But that was then and this is now.)

Winter gives us an identity. In June, July, and August, you can be sensitive about being unappreciated by others, misunderstood, marginalized, objectified, but winter tells you who you are: you are a mammal and nature is making a serious attempt to kill you and you must stay warm, not slip on ice and fall and hurt yourself, and not be impaled on enormous icicles. This is why my people frown on the idea of fleeing to Florida where you sit in the sun and sip fruit drinks with rum in them but they don’t taste alcoholic, they taste fruity, so you drink them all afternoon and by suppertime you are telling the most intimate details of your life to strangers from Cleveland.

No ice fishing means that old men lose the comfort of refuge in a shack on a frozen lake, enjoying dirty jokes and Brotherhood and freedom of speech, escaping that nagging voice that says, “You need a haircut,” “You spilled beer on the rug,” “You said you were going to fix the faucet,” “Look at you, you need to lose some weight,” “You promised the kids you’d go to their concert,” “You need to call Social Security and get a new Medicare card,” “I don’t know why in God’s name you spend hours sitting out on the lake fishing when you could be getting rid of your junk in the basement.”

In this warm winter, nobody’s car refused to start. This is part of Minnesota culture. People carry jumper cables in their trunk. If you see someone in a car with a dead battery, you’re obliged to stop and offer to jump-start their car and they are obligated to accept the offer. In this way, many people who, under normal circumstances, would never have become friends, became friends. I know a man who became reconciled with his ex-wife when she stopped and jump-started his car. Same with brothers estranged by political differences.

Pot roast, the recognition of our identity as mammals, the luxury of ice fishing, and rampant Good Samaritanism: you turn the key and hear the click of the dead engine, someone you never cared for knocks on your window, the hood is opened, there is electrical communion, the engine roars, it’s the Fellowship of the Jumper Cables.

What is the answer? Canada. Come November there may be additional reasons for heading north but the ones I’ve cited may be reason enough. I’m thinking of Iqaluit or Kugluktuk in Nunavut Territory among the Inuit people where polar bears and wolves thrive and where the housing resembles sheds and much of it is on pilings. I am waiting for just the right time to bring up the subject, perhaps after a round of rum cocktails.

In his newest book, Cheerfulness, Garrison Keillor advises: “Adopting cheerfulness as a strategy does not mean closing your eyes to evil. It means resisting our drift toward compulsive dread and despond.”

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