I think it was January 1985 when I first realized how really cold it could get.
It was the first of three times in my life I experienced wind chill temperatures as low as 50 degrees below zero. I was living in the Midwest, going from suburban St. Louis to Columbia, Missouri, to cover a college basketball game. The temperature was plummeting and would reach 17 below, with arctic winds sweeping across the prairies down from Canada pushing wind chill to 55 below.
It was the first time something happened to me that I literally could not believe. My car was parked at the curb outside my apartment building, about 40 feet away. In the time it took me to go from inside the building to inside the car, the inside of my nose froze.
If that sounds funny, it wasn’t.
When I see what’s happening right now in the Midest and the Rocky Mountain states, I think of that.
That was the coldest I ever was, although two other times — both involving college basketball — came close.
I was covering a college basketball tournament in Sioux Falls, S.D., Christmas week 1987. I was there for three days, and it was the last day that the wind chill dropped to 49 below. I was in an end unit in a motel and it was chilly inside the room.
Two years later I was in Pocatello, Idaho, a city with the motto “It ain’t the end of the world but you can see it from here.” Idaho State was one of a few schools to play both football games and basketball in the same mini-dome sort of arena. The wind chill was 50 below and it was the only time in all the years I covered basketball that both teams wore sweats under their uniforms.
It’s tough to heat a big arena when it’s the cold out. The best they could do was 49 degrees. Inadequate but still nearly 100 degrees higher than the conditions outside.
The current-day storm is certain to get the right wingers and climate deniers asking hey, this is supposed to be global warming? Especially with wind chill in Montana and the western part of the Dakotas approaching 70 below.
But no one calls it global warming anymore, even though 2023 was the hottest year on record. At least since they started keeping track. It’s called climate change, and what is definitely showing up as extreme weather at both ends of the spectrum.
In Buffalo, N.Y., two feet of snow this weekend has resulted in a football playoff game between the hometown Bills and the Pittsburgh Steelers being postponed until Monday afternoon. If the game is played and Buffalo wins, there will be another game in Buffalo next week.
I don’t know what the forecast is for next weekend, but I know in the short run it will get colder rather than warmer. Even here in Georgia, nearly 900 miles to the south, we’re expected to have an overnight low of 17 in the middle of this week. That’s shockingly low this far south.
The Buffalo Bills are paying people $20 an hour as well as feeding them to shovel out the football stadium. If you’re wondering how hard that will be, check the picture below.
Twenty dollars an hour isn’t bad, but if there’s that much snow to be removed seat by seat, all I can say is this:
The food they serve had better be damn good.