xtcian

reaching zero Kelvin

1/13/04

I just walked from Prospect Heights to our place in Park Slope, and while a map says that ain't very far, the blithering arctic air made it seem like the death march from Omsk. There is a pervading theory that global warming actually makes the East Coast colder - at least temporarily – because the ice caps melting frigid water from Greenland ends up diverting the Gulf Stream away from us. If that's true, then could it suck any more?

it's actually colder than this, but doesn't O degrees kind of seem like a world gone amok?

Now that I'm really boring you, I'd like to tell you about January 21, 1985. On that day, a cold front came over the Southern United States that froze nads and killed sperm from New York to Savannah. It also happened to be the weekend that my prep school took our yearly trip to Wintergreen, a modestly shitty ski slope outside Charlottesville, Virginia (the bunny slope was called Rabbit Run, which was funny to us smartypants acne-literati, as we had just discovered Updike).

Anyway, when we got to the slope that day, we could tell it was going to really fucking blow. The 90s were years away, and nobody was wearing any "wicking" fabric, and in fact, I was wearing a ski bib. Tessa recently informed me that nobody has worn a ski bib in earnest since the late '60s.

So Hampy and I get on the ski lift, and halfway up the mountain, the thing stops. Silence, swinging in the air. We are too cold to talk, but it's getting ridiculous. Minutes pass by. And then, right where we are stuck, a gargantuan snowmaking machine twenty feet away roars to life, deluging us with a blast of sub-zero needles that makes it impossible to breathe. We are subjected to this for at least five minutes. It is the coldest day in Virginia history, and we are dangling in the atmosphere, being torn apart by shaved ice.

Charlottesville weather records courtesy of weather.com

After an eternity, the lift started again, and when we got to the top, Hampy and I didn't ski off, we just sort of fell over, our limbs rigor-mortised in place. It took us the rest of the day to thaw out, a week to find anything funny again, and I still need therapy from time to time.

the weather at our farm as I write this – even you Canadians have to admit that negative-27 is a little annoying