True story: It was my senior year at Hartwick College, in upstate New York, February, 9 pm, ten below zero, a foot of snow, and my very used car decides to die. I’m on a new highway that few have yet discovered. There’s not another car in sight.
I didn’t have a coat because I was a moron, or possibly a college student, and I assumed I would only be sprinting from car to building and back. I wasn’t planning on dying in a snow bank, but things were starting to head in that direction.
I was in serious trouble. I think I might have exclaimed “jeepers” or possibly “holy cow.”
I figured I couldn’t stay in the car. I’d be dead in a few hours. And I couldn’t walk back the way I came because I knew it would be too far before I saw any homes. So I decided to run for it – straight ahead – because there just might be some civilization in that direction. Maybe I could reach it before the cold killed me.
I started running. It didn’t take long for my extremities to start freezing up. I couldn’t move my fingers, and my feet felt like frozen rocks as they pounded the pavement. Still there were no cars and no buildings. Just snow fields and frozen trees and a steam cloud from my own breath.
That night as I literally ran for my life, I decided that if I survived with all of my digits intact I would sell my piece-o-crap car for a one-way ticket to California and never see another snowflake as long as I lived.
I don’t know how long I ran. It seemed like forever. I started to fade. I knew if I stopped running, the cold would get me sooner. So I kept going, running to exhaustion, stopping, running again, until finally – headlights. A traveling shoe salesman rescued me. It took a while for the feeling to come back to my hands, but I didn’t lose anything to frostbite.
A few months later, immediately after graduation, I traded my car to my sister for a one-way ticket to California. I never saw another snowflake, at least not up close.
My philosophy is that the good reasons for dying do not include “went outside,” as in “Where’s Scott?” “Oh, he went outside without a coat and died.”
This brings me to my point. I’m flying to Chicago today and someone told me it was cold there already. I think I responded “jeepers” or possibly “holy cow.” Cold is just a fancy marketing word for a particularly unpleasant form of pain. We should just call it what it is: pain.
What’s the temperature in Chicago? Painful. Okay, so it’s really only about 50 degrees there, and that’s not so bad, but it’s the Windy City. If you add the wind chill factor, electrons actually stop moving.
I would bring a coat, but I don’t like to pack it, and I’m only going to be sprinting from car to building and back.