Speaking of breezes, I’ve been thinking about the coldest breeze I ever felt. Actually, it was much more than a breeze. It was the iciest blast of cold air that I had ever endured until last year’s hoary, late-December gusts coming from the rooftop of Rocky Mountain National Park and roaring down into Estes Park. Even so, the memory of that first winter experience of what they call an Alberta Clipper still hangs with me as about the coldest, fiercest wind I’ve ever encountered.
I was living in Wisconsin at the time and as a life-long Texan, it was my first experience of a northern winter. It went pretty well for the most part. There was one Sunday afternoon the family piled into the station wagon and drove a ways along the Lake Michigan shoreline to catch a Christmas Cantata at Carthage College. The snowfall was steady that day, and at one point we all looked at the snow-flocked evergreens and the neighborhoods of snow-topped houses and decided it was as if we were driving through a scene on a Christmas card. That winter brought me and Best Daughter our first white Christmas. I still remember the snow falling on Christmas night, and looking up through the living room picture window at the lighted church steeple topped with a cross, at flakes falling gently all around that spire, giving texture to the scene and blanketing us all with the crisp, clean silence of freshly fallen snow.
Flash forward about six weeks later, to an evening when I just HAD to make a run to the grocery store about a mile and a half away. I’d heard a front was on the way and it was already plenty cold, so I dressed for it, or so I thought. We’re talking long underwear, flannel shirt, jeans, and a puffy, down-filled blue coat that made me look like a big blue Michelin Man. Add gloves, a scarf and a hat to the ensemble and that’s what I went to the store in. Kinda like Ralphie and Randy going to school in “A Christmas Story.” I remember feeling overdressed and warmer than I needed to be. That feeling wouldn’t last long at all.
The front blew in about the time I came down the soup aisle toward the checkout stand. Looking outside the storefront window, I could see a banner being ripped from its cords by an invisible and fierce force. A few minutes later, I emerged from the store to immediately discover the force was in fact the dreaded Alberta Clipper.
The Alberta Clipper gets its moniker from Alberta, Canada, which is where the bugger seems to be born, and also from the 19th century clipper ships, which were then the fastest boats in the water. Warm Pacific air moves inland making contact with the mountains of British Columbia and then Alberta, becoming a winter chinook as it makes its way to the prairies, then south to merge with the jet stream. That’s the point at which the Clipper shoots off south and east and in my case, into this Wisconsin grocery store parking lot. Its gale was blowing away everything that hadn’t been moored, tied or anchored. It came at me like thousands of little ice-darts, and in an instant I realized my face HURT. Then my hands, which I’d thought were safely shielded by gloves, began to sting. I remember muttering something very un-vicar-like as I tried to speed the pace to the wagon. Why did I have to buy a whole shopping cart full of bags on a night like this? As I got to the car and fumbled for the keys I realized I’d have to remove a glove to fish them out of my pocket. NO!! But there was no choice. By then, the Clipper had made its way through the Michelin Man coat, past the flannel shirt and long johns to begin its icy assault on the rest of my body. Shivering now, I fished the keys out of the pocket, determined not to drop them. It was hard to navigate the key into the doorlock with eyes squinted shut to keep my retinas from icing over, but somehow I managed. It seemed an eternity, but in truth was only seconds as I hurriedly tossed bag after bag in the wagon’s back seat. I said a prayer for the eggs and thankfully heard no sound of breaking jar glass, only a long, low moan, which I shortly determined to be coming from my own miserably cold throat–so much for the scarf.
Should I make the effort to return the cart to it’s corral? Man, I almost always do this, casting a wary and judgmental eye toward those who don’t. But that night I wavered, before uttering another un-vicar-like thing and trudging with the cart toward the nearby corral. As I did I noticed several un-corraled carts blown around the parking lot by this relentless Clipper. One of them almost crashed into the front fender of the wagon. “How dare those cheese-eating slackers leave their carts out in the open!” Like I said, I’ve got a judgmental streak when it comes to such things.
I’ve never been quite so happy to get in a car and shut the door. I drove home slowly, so as not to get suddenly blown off the road, and then I made a quick decision. The groceries would keep in the back seat overnight. I sure wasn’t going to haul all that stuff in. So I grabbed a couple of necessities– coffee and toilet paper, as I remember it– and I darted the 12 feet from car door to front door, slamming the front door behind me against this unimaginable blast of freezing cold air.
As I think back on it now, that experience was a good one, though it demands a bit of reflection on the many facets of goodness in our life experiences. The Clipper matches every powerful weather encounter I’ve ever had, including Hurricane Carla on the Texas coast in 1962, and a tornado-producing hailstorm that struck our parsonage out on the Nebraska prairie in 2002. Powerful weather has a way of getting the blood circulating and the adrenaline pumping. Its intensity can make you feel more alive, providing of course it doesn’t kill you. The Alberta Clipper in Wisconsin didn’t kill me and wouldn’t have even had the chance to come close given my civilized surroundings and circumstances. But it did bring me a new and powerful experience of cold…serious cold…cold I’d never before experienced. I was amazed at how alternately sore and numb my hands and face were, even in the warm confines of our little house.
We don’t get Alberta Clippers in my part of the Rockies, just those chinook winds blowing down off the tops of the mountains, which are plenty cold enough for this Texas expatriate. But that winter in Wisconsin and the introduction to that formidable cold breeze on steroids known as the Alberta Clipper remains one of the best and most alive chapters of my life thus far.
