The Weekly Screed (#844)

Colder than a catlicker’s nose
by David Benjamin

“We strongly encourage all New Yorkers to stay inside as much as possible… as the cold weather continues. Check on neighbors when you can and bring your pets inside.”
          — Mayor Bill De Blasio, New York City,  temp. 19° F

“That’s winter in Wisconsin. It’s nothing really out of the ordinary.”
      — Steve Grenier, Public Works Director, Green Bay, temp 0° F

MADISON, Wis. — It warmed up a little around here today. I could tell by the time it took my mustache to freeze.

Before facial hair, when I was a schoolboy at St. Mary’s (the public-school kids across the street called us “catlickers” — clever, huh?), I used my nose to test the cold. I’d wrinkle it, then feel for how long it took to unwrinkle. Once in a while, it just sort of turned into a misshapen icicle above my upper lip and wouldn’t wrinkle at all. That’s when I knew it was time to get back indoors.

This morning, the national weather issued dire winter warnings, as though folks can’t tell it’s cold outside without an app that says so.

(Science quiz: At what temperature does a smartphone freeze?)

Hereabouts, we take a frigid few months stoically. We have to. Our outlook inhabits our faces, not just noses and mustaches, but frosted eyebrows and mouths, especially mouths. We tend to converse in a laconic, tightlipped mumble (Wisconics) whose practical purpose is to shield your teeth — lest they freeze — from the prevailing 30 mph northerly wind.

Mounted on the only hill in town, St, Mary’s was, of course, exposed to the wind. The jet stream, hurrying as though late for Mass, swept unimpeded over our naked playground from origins somewhere north of Howling Dog, Alaska. We greeted it at recess. Three times a day, our teachers tossed us into the jaws of the Yukon. Recess was their blessed respite. One of us would have to die before they gave it up.

Most days — above zero — were warm enough for us to play two-line soccer on a field of hard-packed snow, or icy enough to slide downhill, lose our balance, fly backwards and crack our skulls. Now and then, this occasioned a little bloodshed and the odd subdural hematoma, for which the school nurse’s universal treatment was a Band-Aid. When the cold dipped into double-minus digits, however, the urge for childish frolics withered. Then, we just huddled, like penguins at the Pole. Our only shelter was a set of monkey bars, which did nothing but stoke our sense of irony. If the gale raking the hilltop was fierce enough, you could hear the frost-rimed steel pipes softly humming, like a ghostly chorus of dead sled dogs.

Last night on television, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar mentioned that the temperature in International Falls had hit minus-35. There was a note of macho pride in her voice.

This I understood. I remember 35-below here, one crisp day in January, at the corner of Simpson Street and Hoboken Road, where a dozen kids convened every morning to wait for our school bus.

Back then, no one thought of closing schools just because it was cold out. Half of our parents had grown up in farmhouses whose only heat was a Franklin stove in the kitchen and the bathroom was a one-hole privy, ten icy yards from the backporch.

On the day it hit minus-35, the air was strangely lucid and slightly tinged with a sort of glacial blue. Somewhere — maybe on the next block, maybe a half-mile yonder — someone dropped a set of car keys. The sound jarred on my eardrums. When it’s that cold, sound carries forever. We all listened to the plight of a dog, pushed out the door to pee, whining pathetically — his voice so clear that he might have been shivering beside me. Soon, the dog was barking in painful bursts and we — all of us at the bus stop — cringed in frigid suspense ’til he was let back indoors. Or died.

We’ll never know which.

We were all underdressed. The contemporary fabrics — orlon, canvas, nylon pile, one-ply wool — were ill-suited to an Arctic blast of this ferocity. So, we huddled, clenched and stomped, hoping that our bus driver had gotten the engine to turn over.

Getting the engine to turn over was my version of Jack London’s campfire. On days when Mom was due early at Clyde’s, where she sold appliances, I was the kid designated to “warm up” our car, a ’61 Fairlane that Keener, one of my friends, had nicknamed the Brown Bomb.

The Brown Bomb didn’t have a manual choke. Hence, turning her over at any temperature below 10° required a combination of surgical finesse on the gas pedal and the unlikely intercession of a capricious God who felt no compunction against freezing me to death in my mother’s driver’s seat.

I should have worn my coat to fire up the car, but why bother? It offered no protection where I needed it. The Brown Bomb’s seat covers were vinyl, a space-age synthetic that always seemed to me, on cold days, colder than everything else. Before I could even think about igniting the reluctant Fairlane’s ill-maintained six cylinders, I had to squeeze behind the wheel on frozen vinyl that crackled angrily at my intrusion and streamed icy daggers up my ass and into my bones.

By trial and error, over two or three winters, I had learned how to caress her accelerator with my right foot while gingerly trickling quarter-teaspoons of cold-thickened gas into the Brown Bomb’s slutty carburetor. I observed the etiquette of teasing her starter at various durations, a bare second at first, then a little longer, but never — ever — grinding it. The Bomb’s feeble battery had a life force more tenuous than a geriatric hummingbird’s. On good days, if I didn’t flood the bitch, if the battery felt a little sparky and if God was in a good mood, the Bomb would catch weakly and fade, but last another two seconds on the next try and then finally, like a drunk coughing up phlegm and hawking into the toilet, she would sputter to life and keep going.

At which I would turn up the heater, full blast, and sprint back into the  house. “I got it goin’, Mom.”

“Oh, well, turn it off on your way to the bus.”

Mom wasn’t due at Clyde’s ’til nine. But now she knew the car was going to start up and get her there. She would face one less horror that day.

There were other days, too often, when God and the Brown Bomb said no. At which Mom said, “Call Clyde.”

Clyde was a half-blind angel in bearish human form who adopted us — Mom and her three offspring — as his surrogate family, rescued us from frequent folly and loved us more than his own two ingrate kids loved him.

A few years later, I faced the local Draft Board — whom I had petitioned for status as a Conscientious Objector. Clyde showed that day, bearing witness on my behalf, impressing his fellow veterans with his dignity, simplicity, affection and class. He saved me from ‘Nam and probably my life.

I never saw him again. That was the last time I was able to utter the two words that brought to our broken home on Simpson Street a hint of order, a ride through snow and ice, a sense that we had someone to watch over us.

“Clyde’s here.”