Visiting the Cold

After one of the warmest Januaries on record, February is proceeding with below normal temperatures, above normal wind, and about normal snowfall.  It was minus twenty this morning with some wind on the flag out front.  Two more inches drifted onto my deck in the night, ignoring the protecting roof, swirling right under it.   Wind has whipped up the flakes and formed them into little drifts that look like white sand dunes.    

I had a notion while growing up in Pasadena that people from cold climates like this, came to my hometown to retire and get old.  Our city ranked right up there with Miami and Phoenix according to my parents and their friends.  If eastern immigrants did not move permanently, then they came for the winter.  I imagined places like Chicago and Staten Island filled with young winterphobes, surviving and saving for the day they could come to us.  We listened to stories of ice and snow, told at church socials by old folks who had left all that.

And which old-timer is riding a fat-tire bicycle?

But I was wrong.  Or maybe I judged a population from an atypical sample—judged northerners from a few westerners who believed that way.  Here in the “Icebox of the Nation,” I meet, not so many young and wistful, as a preponderance or wrinkled skin and gray hair.  I meet old-timers who might go to Phoenix for Christmas or to visit their kids, then gladly return home for another real winter.  

Keeping one’s driveway and walkways free from snow is an art form, having ranges of quality and individual taste among the old.  I can almost hear Mrs. Jones say, “My walk is lovely and walkable, almost as she might say, “My quilt is unique and I finished it with a pleasant ruffle.”  She has shoveled down to the concrete, and now her desalting chemical is melting away the last of it.  

You remember Sandy, the namesake and owner of Sandy’s Place—long single braid, thin and strong, fast as a hockey player.  I am slower to learn about people like her than they are to discover me.  Isn’t that a fine fate for one who came here ten years ago to observe, blend in, and write an outsider’s view of Frostbite Falls?  And now ten years later, Sandy is not going anywhere, and today her daughter, Katrina, who greeted me almost every morning ten years ago, has returned from Minneapolis for the weekend.  Neither of them hopes to move very far.  

On the way home I step in the same snow-holes I made going, now dusted with a new inch.  It’s intoxicating to swish along on flat white, only my tracks, just white, step after step.  I mean intoxicating in a drunken way, sometimes almost falling because “up” seems a nebulous concept when surrounded by white.  It must be like vertigo that pilots get when everything looks the same from their cockpit window.  Of course, falling on ten inches of snow, underlain with grass, is nothing but silly fun, so different from a fall on ice, which can break a hip. 

I walked three miles to Ranier again today, following the bike trail, now a blanket of snow.  My destination was the warmth of Grandma’s Pantry, the only eating place in Ranier in 2009.  Here is Grandma, as I knew her then, resting after the morning rush, after thirty years in Ranier running this lovely place.  Her daughter did most of the work then, but Grandma was clearly the matriarch, and her wild rice pancakes are legendary.

You can make them, Grandma told me, but it takes a helper and a canoe.  One person paddles or poles into shallows where the wild rice grows.  The other bends the stalks into the canoe and knocks the grains off.  Back at the rice camp, you roast the grain over an open fire.  Now you are ready to remove the hulls by tramping with your bare feet and then tossing into the air where wind carries away the chaff.  Or you can get one-third cup of raw wild rice from Grandma.  Add a cup of water and simmer for twenty minutes.  Pour off the water and add two tablespoons of sour cream, two tablespoons of butter, a cup of milk, and one egg.  In another container, mix a cup of flour, a quarter teaspoon of salt, a tablespoon of baking powder and a tablespoon of sugar.  Now pour the first mix into the dry ingredients and beat until smooth.  Makes about ten pancakes. 

But today Grandma is not around anymore, neither is Grandma’s Pantry—taken over by a modern deli that does not serve wild rice pancakes.  

February 14, 2020

December 10, 2009

On the way I took this picture where I had taken several in 2009-10.  Not much has changed.  Even two troubled trees hang in there.

Much is covered under this blank page. 

I have stood here and seen it. 

Most is not remembered,

but one thing pokes through and

casts its shadow on all that might be written here.  

Michael Angerman has prepared an interactive map of my trip showing daily locations.  Please see Michael’s Map:    Michael's Map