Surviving crazy, cold, weather

Blowing, drifting, wind chilling, but it's less than a month until the average local high temperature reaches 32℉. Unfortunately, first we have to survive that month. As of today, our joke about tRump trying to build a wall on the wrong border has ceased to be a joke. We need a way to keep these damn polar vortices up North, where they belong.

The two whitetails were back at the front feeder last night, once again well before dusk. From the tracks we noticed today, they're also checking out our landscape plants as food sources. When it gets this cold for as long as it's been, animals become less picky about food sources or their location. Some of the tracks were within a couple of feet of the front of the house.

sunrise, fire in ice

Photo by J. Harrington

We've mentioned before, in one or two postings, that we're hard pressed to understand how Native Americans survived around here before they had central heating. This morning we found a couple of resources on MNopedia. First is How the Ojibwe Have Shaped the State, in which we read:

Minnesota winters would seem even longer and more brutal if we didn't have the toboggan for sliding down snow-covered hills and snowshoes for hiking through the woods. The Ojibwe and their tribal relatives first developed the toboggan and snowshoes. Indeed, toboggan is an Ojibwe word, added to the English language by early white pioneers. So is moccasin. The Ojibwe and their tribal relatives first developed moccasins, and lounging around the home wouldn't be the same without them.

MNopedia also includes a section on How the Dakota Have Shaped the State. Not much there about surviving Winter conditions but there is a mention that

...Different bodies of water have served multiple purposes, including the marshes, ponds, creeks, and lakes that are a source of wild rice. Year-round, springs provide access to water, and oftentimes are locations of winter camps....

frosted Winter windowpane

Photo by J. Harrington

We imagine that northern Michigan Winters are enough like Minnesota's that a reading of Robert Downes' The Indians in Winter: How they survived -- and thrived -- in a frozen land  undoubtedly will be instructive.

Come Saturday, Groundhog Day, our local forecast is for temperatures in the upper 30s, a sixty or seventy degree swing within the course of just several days. Consider it a trailer for attractions coming in a month or two. That's what we're going to try for, instead of complaining about the insanity of all this weather.

Cold Morning

Eamon Grennan

Through an accidental crack in the curtain 
I can see the eight o’clock light change from 
charcoal to a faint gassy blue, inventing things

in the morning that has a thick skin of ice on it 
as the water tank has, so nothing flows, all is bone, 
telling its tale of how hard the night had to be

for any heart caught out in it, just flesh and blood 
no match for the mindless chill that’s settled in, 
a great stone bird, its wings stretched stiff

from the tip of Letter Hill to the cobbled bay, its gaze 
glacial, its hook-and-scrabble claws fast clamped 
on every window, its petrifying breath a cage

in which all the warmth we were is shivering.

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