I grew up in Mississippi, a place where it only flurries once or twice a year. But when I was sixteen, I moved to northern Michigan, where it starts snowing at Halloween and stops whenever God wants it to. I couldn’t imagine that anyone would be less than ecstatic at the sight of snow.
My first winter here, I watched the temperatures drop with the autumn leaves and I grew more and more excited to experience the “Winter Wonderland” celebrated on antique Michigan license plates.
Turns out, that chipper license plate is a little misleading. In fact, I wonder if it’s a residency requirement here in Michigan to gripe about the winter.
“Just wait till January,” people would tell me. It seemed like everyone had a story about braving icy roads, getting stuck in snow-drifts, surviving historic blizzards, and, of course, shoveling the driveway.
In northern Michigan, where I once took a photo at the 45th Parallel with a sign reading “Halfway to the North Pole,” winter is more than a surefire conversation starter. It’s a lifestyle. It’s a pillar of culture and a foundation of society. There’s no escaping it.
You see road signs everywhere warning “bridges ice before road” and reminding drivers about snowmobile crossings. Come cold weather, you switch out your lawnmower for a snow blower. You‘re picky about shovels: the ones with a metal tip are the only ones that toss snow and chip away at ice on the driveway. You learn how to defrost your windshield before you know how to parallel park. Just in case you should land in a ditch, you keep an emergency kit in your trunk, equipped with gloves, hats, blankets, spare snow boots, and kitty litter to help your tires spin. You rethink all your notions of fashion—snow boots do match everything, and you can never go wrong with a trusty pair of Carhartt overalls.
At school, I rarely swapped words with the boy whose locker bordered mine, unless we were talking about the road conditions. He would sit on the floor, his back against the locker and his feet sticking into the middle of the hallway, and nod when I walked past. “Did you see that truck that slid into the ditch?” It was his way, I think, of saying “Good morning.”
The high school’s economics teacher, who moonlighted as a professional cross-country skier, said he noticed that the kids who dreaded winter most were the ones who never got outside. I took that to mean that in order to survive winter, you had to embrace it.
Of course, you don’t have to strap four-foot-boards to your feet to enjoy the winter, though I did know plenty of ski bums who spent their Wednesday nights slicing through the snow at Schuss Mountain. There’s also snowmobiling and snowshoeing and ice-fishing. The local YMCA charges about five dollars for the ice rink, if you bring your own skates. One year, my step-father dabbled in maple syrup-making, tapping the one maple in our backyard and boiling down gallons of sap into enough syrup for a single (but spectacular) pancake breakfast.
I took up snow-running, which is the same thing as running except with extra pairs of socks, thermal underwear, and hardware-store screws drilled into the bottom of your shoes for traction on icy paths.
My friends and I, who are not the most athletic people in the world, often had outdoor bonfires in the dead of winter. We’d keep the flames high, wrap wool blankets around our parka-covered shoulders, cup hot chocolate in our hands, and hope the hats and earmuffs didn’t muffle our hearing.
I’ve learned that you can do almost anything you want in the winter—you just have to stuff a few Hothands in your gloves and sometimes your socks.
Six years have passed since I was an inexperienced newcomer from Mississippi. Since then, I’ve accumulated my own tall tales about driving in snowdrifts—I’d love to tell you about the time my brakes gave out on a slippery slope and my car nearly skated right into Elk Lake—and surviving blizzards—maybe one day I’ll write about the New Year’s celebration when we had to dig ourselves out of the old year and into the new.
And I haven’t forgotten about the sub-zero temps, the white-knuckled drives through sheet-iced intersections, the tingly feeling in your nose when your boogers freeze, and the 6 p.m. sundowns. If I could give the season any feedback, I’d suggest a little more sunlight.
But still, the starry-eyed Southerner in me gets excited when the meteorologist starts using the s-word. And the wised-up Michigander in me is ready for whenever it comes.
Hannah Riffell has landed in Lansing, Michigan twenty-three years after she was born there, nineteen years after she moved to Mississippi, seven years after she moved to Northern Michigan, and two years after she graduated from a university in Grand Rapids. You probably can’t find her because she’s either exploring the state, wandering around her city, or just lost in her own head.
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Yeah, but just wait until January!
Just kidding. Hannah, this piece is a Michigander Triumph—it’s got a horror story, it’s got a survival kit, it’s got snowmobiles and ornery Michigan folks—everything I want of a story that pokes fun at my entire personality from November-May!