It’s taken just one cold snap and a couple of dustings of snow, but these days on our fair Island this qualifies as a winter for the ages.
Still, that moisture in the air makes a punishing difference, doesn’t it? And how that wind does bite.
I took note of this phenomenon in extremis on the coldest night of my life after a meal near the Anchorage waterfront in the late 1990s, when my Alaskan girlfriend and I — she was the daughter of a Honduran mail order bride, but that’s neither here nor there — took inadequate shelter at a storefront’s glass entryway, gasping for breath and doubled over in pain, such was the wind-whipped cold.
We’d come down from Fairbanks on the Alaska Railroad, a trip during which we saw moose plowing through snowbanks to escape the oncoming engine.
In fact, I was living in Fairbanks during its second-worst cold spell, January of 1999, when, as I recall, for 20 straight days the thermometer didn’t reach even 20 below. In that perpetually windless air — it practically crackled with cold — you could take a cup of warm water, step outside, and dash it as if in a cad’s face to see instant evaporation.
In that same cold snap I was once neglectful of full-on ear coverage as an unskilled laborer where they were building a new Schucks Auto Supply store, yes, life must go on despite the temps, and my earlobes swelled up and discolored like two cherries after too much time at the dumpster.
But to invert the old Johnny Carson joke about life in Burbank in July, it’s a dry cold. Fairbanks technically qualified as a desert, such was the brevity of its annual precipitation. In winter it simply stuck around for months, as the snow turned gray with exhaust and pollution in the city proper, and then when the thaw came every last bit of dirt and dog mess rose to the surface as the snow receded.
That was then. A quarter-century on, while down here the waters are rising, up there the permafrost is melting. The ground isn’t merely shifting beneath their feet, it’s sinking beneath their buildings.