Winter of Our Discontent

If you grew up in Chicago in the '70s or '80s, as I did, you didn't take winter lightly or treat it with anything less than total respect. If you turned your back on it, tried to ignore it or showed any form of disrespect, the Chicago winter usually found a way to make you pay.

If you got off a bus and decided to walk the rest of the way to the mall rather than wait for the connecting bus, you'd discover, much to your discomfort, that it was a lot colder than you thought, making that eight blocks seem more like 20; the only reason you knew your feet were still attached to your body was to look down and hope that you still saw two slush-encrusted sneakers (not boots--mistake on top of mistake).

If you decided to go for a ride with your brother and his best friend out to the suburbs to see a movie on a bitterly cold day when the thermometer never even came close to kissing zero, the electrical system of your brother's Buick would short out before you could make it back within safe traveling distance; you would have to play navigator (making sure the Buick stayed in its proper lane) while your brother played pilot (driving the car as best he could) and his best friend co-pilot (wiping the frost off the interior of the windshield so your brother might have some slight idea of where the hell he was going).

If you charged down the sidewalk, anxious to get home after a long, frustrating day at work, your right foot will find a patch of black ice and pitch you forward, bouncing your left leg off that sidewalk and transforming your knee and shin into one long plank of pain.

The first two examples cited above took place back in the day. I really did walk all that way to the Brickyard, then an enclosed mall built on what had been, well, a brickyard; it has since been razed and transformed into an outdoor mall, which makes shopping in winter weather even more challenging. My feet hurt so bad once I was inside the comparatively warm confines of the mall that I was sure I had frostbite. In truth, it was just dumbass luck that I didn't.

I also really went for that ride with my brother and his best friend out to Norridge on what turned out to be the single coldest day in Chicago history; the low temperature reached 27 below zero, and that doesn't even take into account the wind chill on what my memory says was a breezy day.

The third example, though, happened last month. It had been reasonably warm that morning, with temperatures in the low 40s, but a strong cold front had moved through early in the afternoon and by evening, all of the puddles and wet spots had flash-frozen into glass-slick patches just waiting for some fool to trundle over--and, that evening, I was the fool in question.

It's been said that this is the worst winter Chicago has had in decades--more specifically, the worst since the winter of 1978-79, when we had wave after wave of snow, almost always followed by bone-brittling cold that prevented any proper melting. That winter also featured what has come to be known as the Blizzard of '79, when something past 20 inches of snow fell, driven by howling winds that sculpted drifts six feet high, hopelessly buried cars and, in one of the more interesting cases of collateral damages in the colorful history of Chicago politics, cost mayor Michael Bilandic, widely blamed for the city's incompetent snow removal, his job. (In one of the most subtle and brilliant political TV commercials ever, rival candidate Jane Byrne stood outside making her case for election while flurries gentle fell behind her. She won.) Schools closed for a week, and the only people able to get around town with any ease were the ones lucky enough to own snowmobiles or cross-country skis.

We haven't had any such snowstorm this winter. It's been more a matter of a few inches here, a few inches there. Never enough to shut everything down, but always enough to slow things down and make it more difficult, if not more outright painful, to get from point A to point B. And then there's the cold, with several days struggling to make it out of single digits--and failing.

The winter of 2007-08 doesn't seem as bad as the winters I lived through in my youth. Then again, memory magnifies everything. The good times seem so much better, the bad times so much worse.

This winter doesn't have to be as bad as the ones in my memory's eye, or even as bad as they actually were (which, really, was bad enough), though, for me to take it seriously--or, at least, more seriously than we've taken winters in recent years, when snow and cold hardly ever stretched to extremes.

Okay, winter. You have my attention and respect again. Now please excuse me--I'm about to go outside, and I need to strap on my Timberlands. (Never let it be said that I don't ever learn from experience.)