What, Winter?
As a missionary kid from Quito, Ecuador, I’ve had at least half a dozen people worrying over me, giving me winter coats as gifts, and double checking that I have snow boots and ice scrapers. I came to Nebraska with the impression that, since I like being cold and I dislike being hot, I will love winter. But at the time, “hot” was the stifling humidity of Alabama’s summers, and “cold” was a rare forty-degree night.
I went home to Quito for Christmas. Since Quito is on the equator, it is always the same temperature, every day, all year long. We also live at 9,000 feet in the mountains, so rather than the “armpit” of Ecuador on the coast, or the balmy Amazonian jungle, or even the snowcapped Andes, Quito experiences eternal Springtime. In other words, it’s perfect. On sunny days, usually around noon, it can get up to maybe seventy degrees fahrenheit. At night, it gets down into the fifties, so there is no need for insulation or heating in our house. We just bundle up with sweaters and blankets until we’re comfortable. My dad likes to wear his sweater, his jacket, and his raincoat in the house if it feels cold enough, and he and I are something like “freezing buddies” in that we like to complain about the cold for the sake of it. But Quito basks in an average of about sixty degrees all year long. You have to agree, that’s a perfect world, right?
In any case, I’d just barely gotten my feet wet in “real” cold this fall. By this I mean it got down to fifteen degrees a couple of times while I was here. Another thing that threw me off was how the sun rises–and especially sets–at different times, which is never the case in Ecuador. I adapted quickly, but morning walks were rough for a few weeks there.
Everyone kept warning me about the horrors of January and February, so I went home for Christmas expecting to get used to perfect weather again, and then to come back and suffer in the negatives. My mom planned on that, too. She went hunting in our hiking box for mittens and scarves for me, since I wasn’t quite smart enough to stuff my winter things in my suitcase. Why would I want my winter things? I was going to Ecuador, and airports are heated. But she insisted that if my flight got delayed on the way back through Atlanta, I would need some layers. I took her advice; she grew up in Nebraska and actually knows what she’s dealing with.
But God was merciful, and it was a warm week when I got back. My real winter adventure started after the first week of classes, when my friend Julia and I went to a dance at a church in Lincoln. Like I said, it had been a warm week, and that morning it rained. But then the rain turned into snow, and it didn’t seem like it was going to stop anytime soon.
Now, here’s the other little detail: I am a very new driver. Not only had I never driven in the snow before, but I had only been behind the wheel in any capacity for a grand total of about five months. But Julia doesn’t drive yet, so it was either skip the dance, or get over my brief panic as I bumbled around my room watching the snow.
I wasn’t planning on driving back after the dance; we were going to spend the night in Lincoln with some friends of mine. So if we could leave before it was dark, we’d be fine. Right? I watched out of my window long enough to confirm that otherpeople were driving in the snow. I asked a hallmate for advice: Drive slow, she said, and don’t use cruise control. Then I asked Julia if we could leave early, before it got dark. Then I asked her if we could leave even earlier and checked to make sure the church was open so we could hang out while we waited. I changed my mind about three times (bless Julia’s patience) before we packed our stuff in my car, worked with a clumsy combination of our hands and the ice scraper to get some snow out of the way, and set off.
Lo and behold, we survived the trip! I remained ridiculously tense, but we took the highway, which was well-traveled and clear enough, and the traffic was both plentiful and moving fast. We met up with my friends and enjoyed the dance immensely.
But that was not quite the end of the adventure. After the dance, we took our stuff back out to the car to find that every door had been frozen shut. We couldn’t get them open for the life of us. It was frigid outside -although as I found out, the cold feels much less cold when you’re with someone else and you have a project to distract you from it. We gave up, left the car there, and asked my friends to drive us to their house.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I was convinced I’d imagined the problem. I mean, I was tired, cold, and inexperienced, and why on earth would the car literally freeze shut? But when we got back the next morning, it was still frozen shut. My friends and I all worked at it. We got things open enough to stuff duffles into the backseatand drive away. Drive away... on tires with slightly low pressure because I didn’t know how to fill them (and still don’t). But that’s a story for another time.
I love adventures. They push me out of my comfort zone so that I can feel myself growing, and that’s exhilarating. And I remain impressed by every Nebraskan who knows their way around the cold, because as a foreign-but-not-foreign (but definitely foreign) student, Nebraska winter is an extraordinary adventure.