Snow Days

The Old Farmer’s Almanac is predicting that this winter will be another cold one. “Teeth-chatteringly cold” is the quaintly old-fashioned description that appears in the preamble to the venerable publication’s long-range winter forecast.

This, for people who live in a house where the toilets have been known to ice over during a hard freeze, is not especially good news. To describe our house as “draughty” is like describing Napoleon Bonaparte as “short.” Raised on piers with high ceilings, uninsulated walls, and ill-fitting windows, the house is fantastically efficient at shedding heat whether you want it to or not. This architectural adaptation to a hot climate is welcome for the nine months of the year when it is actually hot, and a huge source of discomfort the other three. Last January, when snow and ice shut down Louisiana schools and highways and several inches of accumulation had our part of the Felicianas doing a passable impression of arctic tundra, we absolutely froze, dividing our time between huddling around a fireplace, making dashes to the barn to split firewood, and occasionally crawling about under the house with a hair dryer, defrosting plumbing fixtures.

With those memories still fresh as frozen peas, the Farmer’s Almanac’s predictions strike us as ominous; but our kids couldn’t be more excited because—with the exception of the dusting we received last January, when the kids spent their “snow days” tearing about outside wearing half a dozen coats, sliding down the frozen driveway on sheets of visquine and scraping together leafy snowballs—they’ve never seen snow.

Our nine-year-old son Charles is particularly obsessed with whether, or when, this year’s blizzard will begin. He has been scanning the skies for signs of frozen precipitation since the daily high dipped into the eighties. He’s been wearing a woolly hat to school in case of unexpected blizzards since early October. (“It could happen, Daddy; the weather can change fast!”) One could argue that parents not keen on the cold might have considered their son’s passion for frozen precipitation before offering him a choice of destination for a tenth birthday trip (which falls bang in the middle of winter). “I want to go to Maine, Daddy,” he declared, eyes shining. “I want to see a MOOSE!”

You might not have known this, but northern Maine has a higher moose-to-human ratio than any other place in the United States. Charles’s mother and I didn’t when we honored a family tradition by promising each child a trip on the occasion of their tenth birthday. Mathilde, sensible child that she is, chose New York City—a decision that her mother was only too pleased to facilitate. But Charles, who for some reason is as obsessed with moose as he is with snow, had the information at his fingertips and has been unwavering in his assertion that all he wants for his birthday is to spend days up to his waist in snow, pursuing the largest extant member of the deer family through one of the least hospitable winter landscapes in the country.

Still, a promise is a promise, so this February, instead of chopping firewood and huddling around our own fireplace, we will board a suspiciously empty flight from New Orleans to Portland, Maine, to huddle around someone else’s. From Portland we will drive several hours north in a rented 4X4 (a prerequisite), to spend four days in a log cabin on the shores of a body of water named (wait for it) Moosehead Lake. The Internet reports the average daily temperature at Moosehead Lake in February to range between 26ºF (high) and 1ºF (low). From this redoubt we will have at our frostbitten fingertips activities like snowmobiling, snow-shoeing, cross-country skiing, ice fishing, husky-defrosting, and of course outings in search of the huge, belligerent, and by all accounts quite elusive, moose.

According to my wife, who dislikes the cold intensely, the one saving grace is her discovery that the nearby town of Greenville will hold a chocolate festival during our stay. Which is the sort of event your community would put on, too, if the temperature never rose above freezing for months at a time. What our chances of spotting an actual moose are, I’m not sure. But if Charles manages it, and there’s snow on the ground to boot, I’m pretty sure he’ll think that all his Christmases have come at once. That’s worth getting cold for.

And anyway, if the Old Farmer’s Almanac’s long-range forecast for the Southeast turns out to be right this year, maybe we’ll even be warmer there. Stay snug everyone; happy holidays, and careful what you promise your children.