Tag: nature

Cold

December 9th, 2025

I hate the cold. I really do. However, for reasons that even I can’t understand, I live in Wisconsin. Despite the effects of climate change, winter in this state can be brutal. Just an hour ago, I shoveled snow off the driveway. There is probably a good foot of snow on the ground from all the storms that rolled through here in the past two weeks. It’s not even the middle of December yet. We have already had a couple days/nights with temperatures in the teens or single digits (I am talking terms of the Fahrenheit scale). We have months to go before the first hint of spring. I grow weary.

I didn’t always have this aversion to snow and cold. Back in June of 1978, courtesy of the U.S Army, I spent a week on a glacier near Fairbanks, Alaska. Granted, I was there in June, but walking all day on top of a gargantuan ice cube is still kind of brisk. Overall, the experience was fun. It was an adventure of sorts. That week was the only time in my military career when I was required to wear sunglasses. The glare off the ice was intense. I managed to get sunburned under my nose and chin from the UV light reflected off the glacier. I remember distinctly how blue the ice was. When I looked down a deep crevasse, it was as if the ice below me was glowing an azure blue. It was cold up on the ice, but it was something worth doing.

Fast forward a few decades. I worked on the dock of a trucking company for almost twenty-eight years. The building had a roof and well over one hundred doors. The doors were for there for the trucks to back into. That means that these doors were usually open. That means that the ambient temperature on the dock was exactly the same as the temperature outside. In winter it was cold. I mostly worked a night shift, so it got really cold.

Working in the cold is at best miserable. It can also be harmful to a person’s health. Hypothermia and frostbite are not fun. A person learns to dress properly to function in a cold environment, but the truth is that sometimes you simply cannot stay warm. Eight to ten hours in below freezing temperatures sucks the energy out of person. After working my shift in the depths of winter, I often went home, ate supper, took a shower, and crashed in bed. When I woke up, I got dressed to do it all over again. That kind of job wears on a person. It leaves a mark.

Working in the cold is a young man’s game. Now that I am old and retired, I don’t want to go out in frigid weather unless I absolutely must. My body doesn’t tolerate the cold like it did forty or fifty years ago. When my little grandson wants to play in the snow, I go with him, but with great reluctance. I just can’t handle it like he does.

I read once that the Tibetans imagined hell to be a very cold place.

They might be right.

When the Flood Comes

August 10th, 2025

“When the flood calls
You have no home, you have no walls
In the thunder crash
You’re a thousand minds, within a flash
Don’t be afraid to cry at what you see
The actors gone, there’s only you and me
And if we break before the dawn, they’ll
use up what we used to be.

Lord, here comes the flood
We’ll say goodbye to flesh and blood
If again the seas are silent
in any still alive”

Lyrics from Here Comes the Flood from Peter Gabriel

I woke up at around 11:00 PM when I fell out of bed. There was a moment of utter confusion before my mind cleared. The bedroom lit up with a flash of lightning. I could see my little grandson, Asher, asleep in the bed. He was lying there crosswise, as he usually does. He was dead to the world, but the crack of thunder that accompanied the lightning made him roll over and moan. The room was filled with the machine gun patter of rain beating on the skylight. I didn’t bother to look out the window. I knew that I wouldn’t see anything with wind and rain.

My wife and I built our house thirty-four years ago. We live in an area close to Lake Michigan that is relatively flat. It’s not a flood plain, but rainwater tends to drain slowly. We don’t have storm sewers here. The water flows from yards and fields into deep ditches that hug the sides of the roads. Sometimes, when massive thunderstorms roll through, the ditches aren’t quite deep enough to handle the flow of rainwater. Last night was one of those times.

During severe weather, I always check to see if we have electricity. That is the first thing I do. This part of Wisconsin often has power failures. Nearly everyone in our neighborhood has a generator at the ready. Mostly, we need the generators to keep the sump pump (or sump pumps running). We’ve had a flooded basement in the past, and that is a distinctly unpleasant experience. We currently have two sumps in the basement, and last night they both ran almost continuously.

I could hear the sounds of the pumps from the bedroom.

“Click. Wirrrrrrrrrr. Flush. Water rushing from the drain tiles into the sump. Repeat.”

Every fifteen seconds, I heard the cycle of water being pumped out of the basement sumps through a PVC pipe out to the ditch. The outlet of the pipe was already submerged by the water in the ditch, but the force of the pump pushed the water from the basement out of the pipe. The pipe has a one-way valve to prevent water from backing up again.

The noise from the pumps is oddly soothing. It’s when I don’t hear the pumps that I worry. It doesn’t take long for water to slip through cracks and crevices in the basement floor and walls. Once that happens, there’s hell to pay.

I’ve never been in a serious, life-threatening flood, and I hope that I never experience that. Back in 2008, I went with my youngest son’s 8th grade class to New Orleans to help with the rebuilding of the city after Katrina. Keep in mind that we went to New Orleans three years after the hurricane hit. The city was still devastated. My son’s classmates were assigned assist a local family finish working on their home. The owners had to strip the house all the way down to the studs and completely remodel it. In that neighborhood, one out of every three houses were abandoned. I don’t know if that part of New Orleans ever really recovered from the flood.

I don’t ever want to be in that situation.

I didn’t sleep much last night.