Brrr! and Baby, it’s cold outside! With wind chill the temperature is 41 degrees below zero. Our short but severe blizzard moved on but didn’t want us mere mortals to forget, so it left us with temps registering in the lower levels of the thermometer after dumping a foot of snow. Yesterday after the wind lessened I cranked up my faithful John Deere snowblower to take the bulk of the snowbanks off the driveway and sidewalk and then went out this morning to clean up the sidewalk a bit, but I couldn’t stay out more than a couple of minutes. That air is just too sharp to be breathing while exerting. Thankfully it was a short storm. My standard for judging the severity of a blizzard always goes back to the one in March of 1966. It was the worst one in my memory. It was for other people, too, enough so that two gentlemen, Douglas Ramsey and Larry Skroch, published a book in 2004 entitled One to Remember: The Relentless Blizzard of March 1966 containing 661 pages of small type.
The tally of lives lost in that storm came to 18 humans plus uncounted livestock deaths. I spent the three day storm cooped up in a house in Bowdon, North Dakota that I shared with two other bachelor teachers. Believe me, the time passed very slowly. My mother got caught home alone, and luckily when the electricity failed the heating system in the house didn’t require blowers to radiate heat. Dad spent the time at a meeting in Fargo and couldn’t make it back. The cows didn’t get fed for awhile. In the book reference was made of my aunt Lorraine Devitt who stayed to work in a Lisbon nursing home for 30 hours straight before someone could get there to replace her so she could go home to rest.
As I write this I am listening to a radio talk show and hear several old timers call in to speak of the March 15 blizzard of 1941. A Google search turned up these statistics: only one inch of snow fell but 75 mph winds accompanied it and 39 lives were lost in North Dakota and 29 in Minnesota. As we’ve traveled around the country a bit the usual comment from people, upon learning we are from North Dakota, is “I hear it gets cold up there.” Duh.
