Tolkkinen: You gotta respect western Minnesota snowstorms

CLITHERALL, MINN. – As Tuesday’s blizzard hit western Minnesota, a few loud beeps emanated from the corner of our living room.

It was the last gasp of our electronics that died along with the electricity as heavy wet snow spewed across the region.

“We’d better build a fire,” I said, and my husband and I trudged through calf-high snow for armloads of firewood and kindling, thankful neither of us had anyplace to go, and that the school bus would soon drop off our son.

I’ve learned to respect western Minnesota’s winter storms. We’re on the eastern edge of Blizzard Alley, a windy flatland especially prone to high winter winds that includes Minnesota’s Red River Valley region, parts of the Dakotas, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado and Wyoming.

In 2010, when we first moved here, I was on a business trip to Bemidji when a blizzard struck western Minnesota. My husband urged me to hurry back to avoid the worst of the storm. It wasn’t snowing at all in Bemidji, so I didn’t take his warning as seriously as I should have and lollygagged. It was still pleasant by the time I reached Park Rapids, so I motored on, blissfully unaware of the maelstrom lying in wait. Halfway to Wadena, I ran into the first buzz saws of the storm. The wind shoved my car into the oncoming lane, which fortunately was empty. Road signs trembled. Rivers of snow ran across the blacktop until all sign of road vanished. I kept waiting for someone on the radio to acknowledge the storm the way they did the Twin Cities storms when I lived there, but radio hosts kept chattering happily or playing music. It was as if this part of the map was cut off from humanity.

South of Wadena I whiskered past an ambulance parked by a wreck. By the time Deer Creek slid into view, I’d had enough. I parked the car and called my husband to come get me. Even in his big four-wheel-drive truck, the roads were barely passable.

Once or twice a winter, more or less, storms close down I-94 between Alexandria and Fargo-Moorhead. They aren’t the gentle lovely snows of Bemidji that frost the pines and create a winter wonderland. No, they can be raging hellcats of blinding white and ice. It’s been a while since we had one of those old-fashioned storms around here. I worry sometimes that we’ve seen the last of them, given Minnesota’s warming winters, but this one tore in on Tuesday with tooth and nail as if saying, “You ain’t got the best of me yet!”

While the power was still out, the school bus driver, Lee, texted us to meet the bus at the bottom of the nearby hill. A longtime driver, he knows well the treachery of that hill. School buses carrying children have had to back down it in the winter, unable to make it to the top. We’ve been stuck there too, in our car, and my husband has had to walk home to fire up the faithful old Super M tractor to tow us back. So when Lee texted, my husband got into his four-wheel-drive truck and went to meet the school bus.

The power came back on after about an hour and a half. We figured that was the end of the outage, and relaxed. But, nah, it was only being polite, letting us heat up leftover tacos and wash the lettuce before it flickered a few times and went out again. The power company told me it wouldn’t be back for about four more hours, and that there were about a thousand customers without power. We finished eating while somewhere in that dark wildness, power company crews were working on the lines.

Outside, treetops tossed in the wind and moisture trickled down the windowpanes. Inside, the bottom layer of wood behind the woodstove’s glass door heated to a pulsing bright orange while flames shimmied about the crackling top layers. Fire through one pane of glass, snow through the other, like having two televisions. The best kind of Element TV.

We scooped pails full of snow and melted it on the woodstove for flushing the toilet. Got out the headlamps and trouble lights. Set out a candle.

At about 10 p.m., the lights popped back on. We were lucky. The next afternoon, hundreds of households were still without power, many of them in the Arrowhead.

That makes my husband groan, because he does almost all the work of clearing out. My son hates how snow makes everything harder. The cat gets depressed and the dog cowers from the cold.