Ted Kolderie: Winter? We've got it -- in the best sense of the word

Commentary

I'm wondering if somebody in Minnesota has enough initiative and common sense to explain to the country why our cold winter is a good winter.

People who live in Miami or San Diego or New Orleans or Honolulu don't have to worry about winter -- only about rising sea levels, earthquakes, floods and tsunami.

But lots of Americans do have winter. And if you do have winter, the winter you want is the winter we have in Minnesota.

You want it cold.

Just look at the scenes these last few months from cities in the Ohio Valley and parts east: buses sliding sideways down hills on glare ice, cars totally buried in snow along the streets, front-end loaders trying to "plow"; broken trees and power-lines downed with ice; airports shut and passengers stranded.

It's our cold air (the blue and purple on the weather map) that drives the ice and sleet and rain (the pink on the map) down south, away from us.

That gives us the snow that's light and dry. How many folks out east realize that the preferred equipment for clearing sidewalks here these days is the motorized rotary broom?

I've lived in the East. I understand how people there think. It's January and it's 35 degrees and raining; they're miserable. They hear the temperature is 40 degrees lower in Minnesota and they say to themselves: "God, how much worse it must be out there!"

The New York Times called Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak the other day. Hey, Mr. Mayor, just how bad is it out there?

And Minneapolis' good mayor fell right in with it. He told 'em how far over budget Minneapolis is on snow removal -- thereby confirming their convictions (reinforced of course by all those photos of the dumb Metrodome roof).

It wouldn't have been nice for the mayor to gloat over easterners' misfortune this year. But he has lived here all his life. Doesn't he have any sense for the different kind of winters here?

The weatherpeople on TV and in the newspapers fall into the trap, too, with their simple-minded notion that Weather Is About Temperature!

That cold is bad -- when in fact warmer winter weather means gray, damp, dirty and slushy.

Searching for someone with some sense about this, I went into the Minnesota Office of Tourism and asked to see the director. John Edman and I had a nice talk.

He'd known John Borchert, the late and greatly respected University of Minnesota geographer. We talked about Borchert's sense of our winter as "a usable winter."

One January, John and his wife were driving home from the Gulf Coast. For some distance, he said, they saw people outdoors enjoying things.

Then, for hundreds of miles, they saw nobody outdoors enjoying things. Then, beginning in about northern Iowa and into Minnesota, they saw people outdoors again, enjoying things.

The only difference was that up north people had to wear clothes.

I picked up a pocket-sized book from Edman's reception-room table: "Everything To Know About Minnesota," or something like that. I opened to its chapter on "Weather" and read him the first sentence: "Minnesota is known for the severity of its winters."

Good grief.

Here we are, trying to run an economy built around high-tech and business and professional services, the kinds of things that can be done these days from anywhere.

Companies don't have to "live" here the way they did when our economy was timber and wheat and milling and mining.

They can operate anywhere. People can live anywhere. We're not encouraging them very much if we let them think our winters are like those in St. Louis and Pittsburgh, only worse.

Can't somebody get it together to explain our good winter?

Ted Kolderie lives in St. Paul.