Mall Arkey Investments This Week

Friday, January 27, 2012
Cold Weather (by Daron Mayes)
So we survived the latest cold snap in the weather. You would think we’d get it figured out by now, but alas we are always shocked when the mercury goes this low. I hear things like “In my 20 years living here it has never been this cold!” Or, “I don’t ever remember it being this cold!” Sorry folks, but almost every year we get a week long cold snap at some point. In fact, I did a little digging on the internet and without a whole lot of work I came up with a few dates in just the last three years that were comparable to what we had last week. So this is very normal.

During our cold snap my oldest son was telling me that they were freezing walking home from the bus stop and that my youngest was crying (I estimate the distance to be a meagre 150 yards or so from the bus stop to our house). I laughed. “Dad, I almost cried too it was so cold!” he replied. What he failed to mention was the fact his little brother had forgot his sweat shirt at school and as a result was only wearing his T-shirt under his jacket. I also imagined he probably wasn’t wearing a toque because it would mess up his gel-slicked hair.

After listening to the complaining for a while, I thought it was a golden opportunity to tell one of those “up hill both ways” stories. The stories we always loved our parents telling us when we were kids.

So I proceeded to remind him of the fact I actually spent the first 5 years of my life living in Dawson City, Yukon. I have vivid memories of my sister and me walking approximately 8 blocks to and from school each day in bitterly cold weather (there weren’t any school buses up there). As we weren’t allowed to bring a lunch to school, we had to walk home everyday to eat. The good part for me was I was only in kindergarten so my day ended at noon, but my sister Bev had to walk back to school after lunch and then home at the end of each day. Boy does she have some good stories for her kids!

A few years ago I wrote a similar article and did a little research. Sure enough I found my “up hills both way” facts to back up my not-so-tall tales. In the winter of 78/79 the weather in Dawson City hovered around -50 degrees Celsius! In fact, on February 15, 1979 at 12 noon it was -53 degrees. Now imagine me as a five year old with 6 layers of clothes and looking like the Michelin Man trying to walk home from school. No doubt I probably was crying, except my tears were probably frozen to my face!

If only my story was as good as the one’s my Mom still tells me. When she was a kid, they were required to go outside for recess and lunch no matter what the temperature (she also grew up in Dawson City, Yukon). One time she remembers that it was -72 degrees Fahrenheit (-58 degrees Celcius) and her teacher still made them go outside and ‘play’ for 10 minutes. However, she used to also tell me she had to walk to school “up hills both ways!”