Charming host in that video. I miss the old intertunnel. If was full of regular people like her. They didn’t pretend to be experts on geopolitical events based solely on the last three things they saw on CNN. They often just pointed their cameras and their attention at the world around them. It’s another world to me, so it’s interesting. The idea that the regular news media would just go to far flung places and strictly report what they discovered died about the same time as Gutenberg, I guess.
I live in Augusta, Maine now. It’s the big city for us. Got almost 20,000 people in it. We formerly lived out in the sticks, up in the mountains of western Maine. There’s a little corner there where Canada, New Hampshire, and Maine butt heads. Not too far north of our old haunts, the maps call the area “uninhabited.” There aren’t many of those left in the US.
It shows when you go abroad. We went to the Yucatan recently, and it was a very rare local down there who could take a stab at where Maine was on a map, or had even heard of it. We gave up and answered Boston to the cab drivers’ queries after a while. I made my only lame attempt at humor during our visit to Mexico when I was asked to describe where I lived in Maine by a Yucatecan. “Arboles, moscas, y enfermedad,” I said. Got a chuckle, anyway, for my pronunciation, if not the material, even with the the alliteration blown all to hell.
I left out the nieve. My audience in the Yucatan had never seen snow, except on television. My old digs get about 8 feet of snow a year, from October to April. I struggled mightily to describe a moose to my Mayan friends. They never heard of the beast. There’s a stuffed moose in the Portland airport, so I took a picture of it when we came back home, and emailed it to them. I don’t think they were sure of what it was even after seeing one. A horse made by a committee. Swamp donkeys.
It was 6 degrees this morning in Augusta. Nippy. Still, we’re closer to the coast now, and that’s about as cold as it’s going to get around here. But it got me to wondering what it was like where the weather was worse. Besides other parts of Maine, I mean. Maria Solko filled me in. Yakutsk, Russia is colder than a banker’s heart, I tell you what. Winter lasts a long time, too, seven months at least. Maine has five months of winter, and seven months of tough sledding. And July 4th, of course.
They’re not fooling around in Yakutsk, a place I only know about by playing Risk. Wintertime temperatures of -22F to -58F are common. And the sun barely comes up. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t go out to the mailbox in my bathrobe and slippers in January in Yakutsk.
I may have found the place more interesting because I had a frame of reference others might not have. If you live in the banana belt, you know, Massachusetts or some other tropical place, any temps below zero are unheard of. Below the IHOP/Waffle House line, they’re as mysterious as moose in Mexico. If it’s 72 and sunny everyday where you live, numbers like -22F to -60F are an abstraction. It just becomes a statistic that doesn’t register. But it hit -22F at our old house once or twice while we lived there. I know how we handled temps like that. Handled them badly, to be sure, and not very often, but we handled them. I’m scratching my head about how to handle -60F. Well, I would, if I could get at my head under the fur hat with flaps.
It’s funny, but it snows much more in Maine than Yakutsk. It doesn’t snow much when it’s that cold. It hardly snows at all in Antarctica, for instance, according to scientists who live there and might be lying, how would we know? It’s also amusing to me that despite plumbing the angry portions of the thermometer much more thoroughly, Yakutsk and western Maine have almost identical weather in the summer, although their days are longer, I gather. Both report temps from 65F to 86F. Summer in Maine is pleasant, so I assume it would be in Yakutsk.
It’s amazing to me how resilient and inventive human beings are. I couldn’t conjure up a reason why anyone would tough it out in Yakutsk, and take a meteorological beating like that. So I asked Chad, and he laughed at me a little. Dude, Yakutsk has gold like an army of Scrooge McDucks and coal like a million Santas and oil and gas like a legion of Rockefellers and more diamonds than Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Oh yeah? Well western Maine has… has… has… arboles, moscas, and enfermedades. Advantage Yakutsk, I guess.
9 Responses
This is far easier to digest than Spengler, especially after the day I’ve had.
Hi Jed- Happy New Year to you.
Grew up in NJ with the damp and cold. Glutton for punishment, moved to north central VT for 20 years. We saw -33f, trees popping in the woods, and power going out. Nor’easters dropping 20-30 inches in 24 hours. Can you say mud season? IYKYK. Heated with wood mostly. It was an adventure, and I wouldn’t trade it for a minute.
BUT…now 11 years in central Florida. Yeah, summer sucks, but God bless Willis Carrier. Basking in mid 70’s in late December? Lunch outdoors on the lanai by the pool? Cold snap coming that might see 35F? I’m done with the snow and cold. My joints are much happier. Bless you for living in the great north wood, even if you are in the city.
Hi Ralph- Happy New Year to you.
I’d say your digs in Vermont were probably quite similar to our climate catastrophe in Maine. Before we moved here, my only real frame of reference for the New England super-winter climate was Mount Washington in New Hampshire, which is often touted as having the worst weather in the world. After we moved to Maine, I rolled out a map, and looked at it agog, and said to my wife,”You’re telling me we have to drive south to get to Mount Washington? My God, what have we done?”
I tell my wife every time frost threatens: Darling, we didn’t move fare enough south.
My wife and I both grew up in Minnesnowta, where hitting -40°F is not unusual. For our Canuckistan brethren this is also -40°C, which gives us the phrase, “Minus forty effin’ see”. Not seeing the thermometer get above zero for a month wasn’t too unusual, but we had to keep one of the kitchen cabinet doors open day and night to keep that particular pipe from freezing.
We are now political and economic refugees from the Soviet Socialist State of MN, having moved here to TinyTown™ in NW Wyoming. Winters are NOTHING in comparison to MN, where once the snow falls in October it frickin’ well stays on the ground until April. Here, we’ll get three feet of fluffy, white glueball-wormening and it’ll be gone in about a week.
This morning it was -9°F and we had a paltry 3″ of fresh climate change on the ground, with a nice 1-foot high drift 10 feet in front of the garage stretching the width of the driveway. Naturally I went out and shoveled, and just as I finished one of our gentle, balmy WY breezes sprang up (about 25 MPH) and promptly blew ground snow all over what I had just cleared. If you can’t laugh about that you just plain shouldn’t be living here. On t’other hand the sun has been out all day and melted almost 100% of the ice off the back (south-facing) deck, so I’m gonna call it even.
We never, ever complain about the snow around here because it’s what we drink in the summer. A full reservoir means never having to say you’re sorry.
Hi Blackwing- Happy New Year to you.
On the climate map, there are various places up north that are on average 5 degrees colder than where we lived in western Maine. Far northern Maine was one, and you’ve lived in two of the others. Five degrees might not seem like much on paper, but Frostbite Falls Minnesota and the northern parts of places like Wyoming and Dakota… whoah Nellie. Not Siberia, maybe, but Siberian, surely.
We went to the Yucatan recently, and it was a very rare local down there who could take a stab at where Maine was on a map, or had even heard of it. We gave up and answered Boston to the cab drivers’ queries after a while.
I am reminded of a New Years spent in Venezuela. I spent New Year’s Eve at the family of a fellow co-worker. The next day I was riding around with his wife and her relatives. (He was offshore on a rig—where I would soon be going.) When a cousin asked me where I was from, I replied, “CT.”
“Where in CT?”
“It’s a small town—you would have never heard of it.”
“Is it anywhere near _____?”
I replied, “You knew XXX!”
XXX and I had graduated from the same regional high school. XXX had been in the Peace Corps in Venezuela. At the end of his two years in the Peace Corps, having married a Venezuelan, he stayed there. He was killed in a motorcycle accident in Venezuela. (His dad was also a motorcyclist.)
Small world.
The Siberian video was interesting. That city has an annual mean temperature of 18.7 degrees F. That is COLD. Makes Rumford, with an annual mean temperature of 44 degrees, a hothouse. My hometown, 49 degrees. Where I have lived for decades, 20 degrees higher.
Hi Gringo- Happy New Year to you.
One of the pleasures of being far from home is the stupid amusement of finding anyone or anything even remotely familiar.