Blizzards? Snow?

                                        Brrrrrrrrrrrrr … Been There!
                                                          By Jeff Salter

            It’s an appropriate week to yak about inclement weather:  I have friends in both IL and RI who’ve had recent blizzards with nearly 10 inches of snow.
            As a toddler, I spent a couple of years in Chicago, and one of my few vivid memories of that time was gazing at the snow, piled up along the sidewalks — those drifts were taller than I was.
            But I’m mostly a product of the mid-south, where (in my early years) the rare snowfalls were met with a sense of surprise and delight.  Later, I spent a year in Iowa, where snow and frigid temperature was plentiful.
            But none of that compared with the nearly 11 months I lived in the Arctic.  Yeah, that region which surrounds the North Pole.  I was stationed at Thule Air Base in NW Greenland during the Vietnam Era when many of my buddies were in Southeast Asia.  I didn’t complain.

"Summer/Late Spring" (i.e., about 2-3 months of the year)

            I thought I would show you what my base was like.

"Winter" (i.e., about 8-9 months of the year)

            The main complex was nestled in between two (rather low) mountain ranges and it fronted North Star Bay, which (at that time) was the Free World’s deepest cold-water port.
            I had deja vu from my Chicago years:  the snow drifts were STILL taller than I was! 

Midnight Sun and Arctic Night
            As many of you are aware, the extreme polar regions experience extended periods where the normal day/night rules are suspended.  At our latitude, we had approximately 10 weeks of ‘Midnight Sun’ when it was NEVER dark at night … and approximately the same duration of ‘Arctic Night’ when you NEVER saw any sunshine.
            Some guys used the Arctic Night as excuse to go bonkers.
            I watched a lot of movies and played a lot of ping-pong.  And I wrote.  Poetry, mostly.  Here’s one which partly captures the sense of isolation and unforgiving cold:

                       Arctic Night
                   By Jeffrey L. Salter 

A walk in the snow at forty below
     in the flesh-freezing Arctic Night;
the wind is the only friend that I know,
     my only companion – its bite. 

This wasteland was surely forgotten by God;
     nothing’s in ninety miles’ sight.
It was spit like old tobacco chew wad
     and forsaken by warmth and light.
Right now as bloodless wind gnaws and blows,
     warm shelter’s my passionate dream;
I have no feeling in my face or nose
     and my mouth’s too frozen to scream.

There’s no one left, so perhaps I’ve been chosen
     to wait for the promised sunlight,
and so I’m alone in the dark: cold and frozen
     in perpetually stark Arctic Night.
The wind howls like hungry wolves in my ear,
     my body is burning with fever;
my thoughts are drugged with the numbing fear
     that the night will last forever. 

A walk in the snow at forty below
     in the flesh-freezing Arctic Night;
the wind is the only friend that I know,
     my only companion – its bite. 

Winner:  Joel L. Fletcher Award  (First Place & Cash Prize)
1975 Deep South Writers & Artists Conference 

Interesting Experience
            Thule was an interesting experience.  I certainly didn’t want that assignment — but it was a whole lot safer than Vietnam / Thailand.  There was a saying in the Arctic, when someone fretted whether he might get into trouble for whatever:  [when you cleaned up the language] it was, “What’ll they do … send me to Thule?” 

Trivia
            For people who need reference points:  Thule was at nearly 77 degrees latitude … about 930 miles from the North Pole.  While there, I rode over 400 miles north in a C-130 cargo plane to a Royal Canadian Air Force Station called Point Alert, which was only 515 miles from the Pole.
            It was said, gleefully, that “there’s a woman behind every tree.”  Of course, there are no trees that far north.  In fact, the only plant-life at all was a very hardy type of grass/weed which could grow in the perma-frost (ground that never completely thawed).
            It was also said there were no insects at Thule.  Supposedly they can’t survive in that environment.  I debate this maxim because (at a remote, abandoned outpost) I was attacked by some invisible stinging SOMETHING which made microscopic bites all over my body.

 Question:
            What’s the most extreme weather you’ve ever been in … for any length of time?