BBBRRRRR, it's COLD

The Cold

Never will I forget a National Geographic film I saw about Eskimos and their daily lives in the frozen North.

The film featured a caribou hunting expedition, the capture and butchering of a whale, a deadly encounter with a polar bear, the building of a boat from hides.

Parts of the film were made inside an Eskimo lodge, a structure we know as an igloo. Beds were on shelves formed from ice, and insulated with blankets made of animal hides.

The film captured a lively toddler wearing only his birthday suit, cavorting gleefully, giggling outrageously, on one of these beds. The cameraman briefly showed us a large-faced thermometer which read “40 degrees Fahrenheit.”

But wait a minute. The camera went back to the thermometer for a closer look. The dial read “minus” 40 degrees. Forty below zero. Mighty adaptive, these human beings.

Sitting with The Cats

Last summer, after dreaming, planning and hoping for many years, we were finally able to enclose the deck on the south side of our home.

As a major component in the enclosure, we used six sliding glass doors, recycled from one of the apartment houses. We mounted the doors “sideways,” and inserted other salvaged windows to fill in. It became a big old glass room, private due to its unique site in the neighborhood.

When we first dreamed of enclosing the space, I had envisioned a “summer room,” perhaps with a bed, a recliner, a reading lamp or two, bookshelves.

I had nostalgically recalled the days Laura and I lived in Fort Lupton, when our year-round bedroom was “the deck” on the back of the little house.

By the time the deck enclosure dream became a reality here in Greeley, we sorely needed the space for the cats. The feline population had outgrown the interior of the house. (Actually, the cats had begun to think of us as intruders in their domicile.)

So outside, to the new enclosure, went the kitties. They are fed there, their sanitary needs are facilitated there. This was not what they really wanted, but we are still bigger than they are. So far.

It wasn’t too long until we found ourselves out on the deck during the evenings, reading, with the cats for company. Laura gathered this and that and assembled a comfy reading and resting area for us.

Tony the Tiger and Sammy the Siamese Lady quickly found favor on the blanket on my lap and under the heat lamp over my head. For many weeks, they have been my reading partners.

Beside me, Si the Siamese Man-Kat found similar accommodations with Laura. Si has grown so large that there isn’t room on Laura’s lap for any additional cat-people.

So it went for quite some time. I would read the daily scriptures, my books about the Church, my truck and hot rod magazines, while the cats studied me with baleful eyes. It has been one of the most relaxing, fruitful and enjoyable times of my life.

As winter deepened, Laura added an electric blanket to the collection of fibrous comfort on my chair. I began wearing my “hoodie” sweatshirt and a wool serape given to me by my friend Ray.

The colder it got, the more blankets and clothing I added. I watched sadly as the thermometer drooped ominously.

We were not at all uncomfortable at 30 degrees Fahrenheit. We could see our breath. We could see the cats’ breath. The tip of my nose got cold, and dripped. But still I wasn’t uncomfortable.

Even when the thermo read 20 degrees, I vowed to stick with it. I wrapped a kerchief over my nose and mouth. The cats were right there with me, on my lap, in their little fur coats.

Because we took pity on the little guys about a week ago, we opened the pet door to the utility room so they have a 60-degree haven. Still, so long as I was on the deck, I’d have kitty company.

But at ten degrees? Zero? I finally had to say, sorry cats, I’m going inside. I suppose I could buy me a big old Carhartt snowmobile suit, or one of those electric bags worn by those sissy Goldwing guys.

Naw. It’ll warm up tolerably in a few days. Right? Won’t it? After all Al Gore is still talking about Global Warming. He should know!

The Larkspur Adventures

About halfway between Denver and Colorado Springs, on old Highway 85, is the little tiny town of Larkspur.

West of Larkspur, in the late 1940’s, was a large pine-covered ranch owned by the Counter family. The Counters operated the Fort Lupton Canning Company, and my dad was a high school classmate of Ben Counter.

Ben and Dad remained friends, and there may well have been a relationship involving the Fort Lupton Volunteer Fire Department.

For several years a few weeks before Christmas, members of the Counter family and others from Fort Lupton would board my Dad’s 1945 Ford B-5 school bus and head for Larkspur.

There, tire chains would be installed on the bus, and an adventure would be experienced going up a steep trail covered in deep, undisturbed snow. On particularly successful years, the bus would make it all the way to “the lodge,” a huge old cabin that was warm and cozy.

Other times, the group would have to be content with staying at one of the lower cabins on the trail – if the snow was too deep to go further.

The purpose of the trip (or so we kids were told) was to gather Christmas trees from the ranch. We had a lot less room in the bus going home, because Christmas trees are voluminous.

One year, while staying in a cabin at a lower elevation, I came inside from play and sought out my mother to report to her that I had no feeling in my feet.

It was then that she and the rest of us discovered that polio had had an impact on the circulation in my lower extremities.

Mom took off my brace and boot. My feet were blue, and I really had no feeling at all, no sensation. Mom set me up by the cabin’s fireplace, and my little tootsies began to thaw.

All too soon, the adults realized it was time to leave the Counter ranch and head down the mountain to Fort Lupton.

I couldn’t get my shoes on. No way. My feet were still too cold to respond.

Mom put some of Dad’s wool sox on my little blue feet. Dad picked me up and carried me through the snow to the bus. He seated me by the heater, next to him, up front.

Good times and bad, the Larkspur trips are a lasting, wondrous childhood memory for me, and for my brother Dick, too.

And I’ll be thinking about those memories tonight when I walk the one-block walk home, zero degrees in the snow.

If I’m real quick, my feet won’t turn blue.

-0-

Word of the Week: Miscegenation. It’s from Latin, miscere, to mix, and genus, race. It means marriage or interbreeding between different races, specifically in the United States between whites and negroes. What do we think, morally, about miscegenation?

Next week’s word: Syncretism.