Cold Article
This article was published in the Grand Forks Herald the other day. It captures much of the northern-midwestern spirit. Me likes it.
Feb. 01, 2004
MATTERS AT HAND: The cold in life, literature and lore
By Mike Jacobs
The cold is so large a presence in our lives that it is not surprising that it is so large a part of our imaginations.
Heat is often a central character in southern literature, and cold is often an active force in our own.
O.E. Rolvaag makes the cold a killer in
"Giants in the Earth." Though Rolvaag homesteaded in what is now South Dakota, his great novel stands as the classic telling of the Norwegian immigrant experience on the Great Plains, and so, North Dakota has adopted it.
Lois Phillips Hudson uses a radio reporter's recitation of cold temperatures on North Dakota's coldest day to increase the sense of isolation and foreboding in her Depression era novel "Bones of Plenty."
Likewise, Louise Erdrich, a modern novelist, uses the cold as a leitmotif in her fiction. The cold makes an appearance in the opening pages of "Love Medicine," her first and best known work, and it reappears to help frame place and story in such other works as "The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse" and "Tracks."
The weather is cold, or at least chilly, in Larry Woiwode's "Beyond the Bedroom Wall," and it is frigid in Larry Watson's "Montana 1948" a North
Dakota novel despite its title.
Aside from the Holy Spirit, the cold is the main character in Leif Enger's novel "Peace Like a River." Enger is a Minnesotan; time in his novel is divided between Minnesota and North Dakota.
For Thomas McGrath, North Dakota's great poet, the weather is a useful in evoking spirit and emotion. Here is a small sample from "Letter to an
Imaginary Friend:"
"The more the snow falls, the more my
heart feels empty."
Likely this speaks for every Midwesterner who has pressed an anxious face to a window and felt minimized by that great force on the
other side of the glass:
The weather.
Still we have managed to embrace the cold. Friday afternoon, Betty Feltman, one of our advertising reps, organized the staff to bundle up,
brave the cold and stand on a snowbank for a photograph. Her suggested caption: "At 40 below, the staff of the Grand Forks Herald has frozen our assets." She plans to send the photograph to Knight-Ridder's employee newsletter.
The ice-fishing tournament is another direct challenge to the cold. Probably hockey first appealed to people as a challenge to the cold, as well. Of course, it's matured into something quite different in places as cold as Grand Forks and as hot as Phoenix.
Individuals make their own cold weather stories. In Grand Forks, coffee drinker Dan Dahl took a picture of the straw that froze to his car door when he spilled a coffee drink against it. Chicagoan John Jaspar, in town on a business trip, tossed boiling water into the air just to see what would happen. All of us who've done that treasure the surprising crack and the twinkle as the vapor turns instantly to ice, passing from vapor to liquid to solid in a split second.
My uncle, Court Schubert, recorded North Dakota's lowest temperature, 60 below, at Parshal in 1936. He said saliva aimed at the ground froze en route.
In pursuit of my own story, I ventured out before dawn Friday, at about the time the thermometer reached 44 below, the coldest temperature recorded in Grand Forks and the coldest I have ever experienced.
The cold and the silence were total, the air crystalline and the ground shrouded in a layer of low fog. Apparently this was resulted when the
snow gave up its warmth to the frigid air.
It was a splendid moment.
It may be that the economic developers can't market them, but such moments are part of North Dakota's appeal to me.
Personally, I would change that last sentence to: "It may be that economic developer can't market them, but to me, such moments are part of North Dakota's appeal." So let's just pretend it was that, shall we?
Feb. 01, 2004
MATTERS AT HAND: The cold in life, literature and lore
By Mike Jacobs
The cold is so large a presence in our lives that it is not surprising that it is so large a part of our imaginations.
Heat is often a central character in southern literature, and cold is often an active force in our own.
O.E. Rolvaag makes the cold a killer in
"Giants in the Earth." Though Rolvaag homesteaded in what is now South Dakota, his great novel stands as the classic telling of the Norwegian immigrant experience on the Great Plains, and so, North Dakota has adopted it.
Lois Phillips Hudson uses a radio reporter's recitation of cold temperatures on North Dakota's coldest day to increase the sense of isolation and foreboding in her Depression era novel "Bones of Plenty."
Likewise, Louise Erdrich, a modern novelist, uses the cold as a leitmotif in her fiction. The cold makes an appearance in the opening pages of "Love Medicine," her first and best known work, and it reappears to help frame place and story in such other works as "The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse" and "Tracks."
The weather is cold, or at least chilly, in Larry Woiwode's "Beyond the Bedroom Wall," and it is frigid in Larry Watson's "Montana 1948" a North
Dakota novel despite its title.
Aside from the Holy Spirit, the cold is the main character in Leif Enger's novel "Peace Like a River." Enger is a Minnesotan; time in his novel is divided between Minnesota and North Dakota.
For Thomas McGrath, North Dakota's great poet, the weather is a useful in evoking spirit and emotion. Here is a small sample from "Letter to an
Imaginary Friend:"
"The more the snow falls, the more my
heart feels empty."
Likely this speaks for every Midwesterner who has pressed an anxious face to a window and felt minimized by that great force on the
other side of the glass:
The weather.
Still we have managed to embrace the cold. Friday afternoon, Betty Feltman, one of our advertising reps, organized the staff to bundle up,
brave the cold and stand on a snowbank for a photograph. Her suggested caption: "At 40 below, the staff of the Grand Forks Herald has frozen our assets." She plans to send the photograph to Knight-Ridder's employee newsletter.
The ice-fishing tournament is another direct challenge to the cold. Probably hockey first appealed to people as a challenge to the cold, as well. Of course, it's matured into something quite different in places as cold as Grand Forks and as hot as Phoenix.
Individuals make their own cold weather stories. In Grand Forks, coffee drinker Dan Dahl took a picture of the straw that froze to his car door when he spilled a coffee drink against it. Chicagoan John Jaspar, in town on a business trip, tossed boiling water into the air just to see what would happen. All of us who've done that treasure the surprising crack and the twinkle as the vapor turns instantly to ice, passing from vapor to liquid to solid in a split second.
My uncle, Court Schubert, recorded North Dakota's lowest temperature, 60 below, at Parshal in 1936. He said saliva aimed at the ground froze en route.
In pursuit of my own story, I ventured out before dawn Friday, at about the time the thermometer reached 44 below, the coldest temperature recorded in Grand Forks and the coldest I have ever experienced.
The cold and the silence were total, the air crystalline and the ground shrouded in a layer of low fog. Apparently this was resulted when the
snow gave up its warmth to the frigid air.
It was a splendid moment.
It may be that the economic developers can't market them, but such moments are part of North Dakota's appeal to me.
Personally, I would change that last sentence to: "It may be that economic developer can't market them, but to me, such moments are part of North Dakota's appeal." So let's just pretend it was that, shall we?