By Parker Heinlein
Outdoors columnist
I’m beginning to suspect that the Yahoo who said, “If you don’t like the weather wait 15 minutes,” froze to death a couple of weeks ago and is buried in a snowdrift.
The weather up here has changed little in the last month. Snow still covers most everything and while the temperatures have moderated a bit, the mercury continues to have a hard time getting out of the single digits.
Apparently I now live either too far north or east to benefit from the Chinook winds that clear the snow from the ground across much of Montana.
This has the look of one of those winters that children will hear about for the rest of their lives, just like the ones I heard about growing up.
“We had to walk 14 miles through knee-deep snow just to get to school,” my father used to tell me. “It was so cold when we milked the cows we got ice cream.”
A couple of 30-below spells combined with more snow than usual has given the landscape a decidedly Siberian flavor.
At least the roads have begun to clear. A couple of weeks ago there was so much ice on the highway north to Canada I cut short a trip to visit friends and turned around after just a few miles.
A large gathering of antelope – hundreds, maybe more – grazed in the snow on each side of the highway and I stopped the truck as a group of about 40 began to cross the icy pavement ahead of me. At least half of them lost their footing before they reached the other side of the road, and the last goat in line – a fawn – flipped upside down and landed on its back on the ice.
I eventually reached the relative safety of the snow-covered streets in town, parked the truck and took refuge in the warm house where I could forget about winter for awhile.
But the howling wind is hard to ignore, even with the volume cranked up while I watch “Spring Breakers Gone Wild.” Cabin Fever, I fear, may become harder to deal with this winter than the weather.
And even if I spend most of my time inside until spring, I’m sure I’ll forget that detail when regaling my great-grandchildren with stories of how I survived the winter of ’09.
But instead of waiting 15 minutes and expecting the weather to change, which apparently isn’t working this winter, I’m doing the next best thing: writing about it.
I have hopes that this column will have lost all relevancy by the time it’s published.
Perhaps the snowbanks will even have melted and that Yahoo will once again be spouting his refrain.
I just don’t know what else to do.