This morning our thermometer read -9. That's minus nine. I don't recall seeing -9 before, except in Fairbanks, Alaska, where I lived for several years an eon ago.
Things get weird at negative temps. We used to have to plug the car in up there. Every parking spot had an outlet and you'd plug the car in when you did errands, and overnight in the garage. Of course this led to a number of incidents when I'd back out of the garage and forget to unplug the car first. Went through a number of power cords that winter.
Speaking of the car, that's where things were weirdest. Once my steering wheel cracked in my hands. Didn't break, but I drove with a few cracks in it all year. And rubber does freeze. The car tires would freeze overnight and when you started driving in the morning, it would sound like you had four flat tires until they heated up enough to be round again.
The worst were the white-outs. These weren't formed by any weather pattern, but by frozen exhaust lingering on the road. Especially as many folk wouldn't turn their cars off when they ran into the convenience store - they'd keep them running. So the vapor in the exhaust would freeze and you couldn't see a thing. They'd actually report them on the radio like traffic jams. "There's a whiteout on mile 6 of Chena Road" etc.
My ex-hubby and I had two dogs - more like curs, really. One had the habit of stealing objects in the neighborhood and bringing them home to the yard. The subsequent snows would freeze everything and come spring, it was like a stratified archeological dig as things would begin to appear under the snow. Hairbrushes, an alarm clock, a huge moose foreleg - god knows where he'd find these things.
The paperboy delivered on a snowmobile, as the streets would glaciate and not melt all winter (yes that's a verb). My husband would put on red flannel one-piece long johns (with the flap in the back) and essentially not take them off til May. And back then many people didn't have cars, or cars that ran at negative temps. So hitchhiking around town was pretty common. We were young hippies and thought it was all cool. Unless they were holding an ax, you pretty much picked up hitchhikers at 50 below.
As if we didn't feel isolated enough, we were actually a day behind the lower 48 as far as TV news went. You'd get the TV news one day late. I'm not kidding. They'd fly the tape up to Fairbanks overnight and play it the next day. Walter Cronkite was still a newsman back then. Whenever Walter would say: "And that's the way it is, December 8th," you'd have to correct him.
The whole Alaska experience was pretty interesting. And the Northern Lights were truly trippy. I know this all makes me sound like some old sourdough codger, but I guess that's what I am.
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