I’d never experienced anything like it. It was negative nine degrees Fahrenheit. With windchill, it was negative forty. For reference, I live in Indiana, not Antarctica. It was like the sun had been replaced with one of those LED bulbs that produces soft light but no actual heat. If it got any colder, all atomic motion would have stopped and the universe would have come to an end. But the mercury hovered just north of that, so we all had to keep on living, albeit in the worst possible conditions. Our house didn’t get the memo and gave up.
The old Victorian edifice we call home failed section by section. First, the washing machine stopped working. The laundry room is in an addition under the sloped roof line and lacks adequate insulation. The only warmth the walls provide is through the placebo effect. Predictably, the water line to the washer froze solid. There would be no laundry that day. Not that any of us needed clean clothes. Everyone was wearing pajamas, bathrobes, and anything else we could wrap around ourselves to avoid hypothermia. When we moved around the house, we looked like walking blanket forts. The prevailing style here was survival chic.
The second floor bathroom was the next space to go. This room is allegedly insulated, but only with the best technology 1912 had to offer. The walls are mostly filled with horse hair and good intentions with a few dead mice mixed in. The water lines run up an external wall, which is a big no-no when outside temperatures are cold enough to kill a tauntaun before the first marker. Our twelve-year-old, Betsy, reported to us around bed time that the cold water had stopped working. Not that anyone was looking to douse their hands with cold water at that particular moment, but with nothing available to mix with the hot side, the only available washing temperatures were scalding and null set. We told the kids to use the bathroom attached to our attic bedroom. None of them took us up on it. There isn’t as much hand washing in this house as I’d been led to believe. Give my kids a high-five at your own risk.
Our attic bedroom heater soon joined in on the quitting fun. Because our master bedroom is an addition, it’s not tied into the vent system that covers the rest of the house. We have a combination heating and cooling unit over the door. When in air conditioner mode, it sometimes freezes, and when providing heat, it occasionally blows cold air to see if we’re still paying attention. For what it’s worth, frostbite is extremely noticeable. When the unit stops doing what it’s supposed to, the highly technical fix is to turn it off and back on again. Sometimes it works when it comes back on, and sometimes we just have to huddle together for warmth. Lola would rather freeze to death. This time, when the furnace gave up, we opened the door leading to the rest of the house. Heat rises, so it kept our third floor room just above the frost point. The downside is we could hear the kids all night. There were a lot of thuds and wails for children who were supposed to be asleep. Everyone knows 2 a.m. is the best time for wind sprints. Not that I expected anything different. Ninety-nine percent of all alleged hauntings are just kids who refuse to stay in bed.
One of the few things that worked correctly during the Big Freeze was the main furnace that heats the majority of our house. It used to fail when it was cold outside, which is the only time you really need it. It was kind of like having an umbrella that only works when there’s not a cloud in the sky. On days with meaningfully unpleasant or dangerous temperatures, the furnace would overheat, and I’d have to turn it off and back on again like an uncooperative router. Finally, after years of waking up to power cycle the thing while HVAC experts threw up their hands in exasperation, a twenty-year-old technician in his first year out of trade school took one look at it and solved the problem. The installers built it wrong when they put it in ten years ago. It had one giant pipe to send air in, but it needed two. He fixed the issue once and for all for five hundred bucks. That guy deserved a medal, not for valor, but for basic competence at the job he was paid to do. That’s the rarest skill in the world these days. Thankfully, he used it to great effect on our furnace a few years ago, so we survived the recent cold snap. I wonder if it’s too late to send him a fruit basket.
While the house still felt cold, it was a tropical paradise compared to the outside world, and our pets knew it. Exterior temperatures were an acute threat to our animals—and the carpet. If it’s too frigid outside, the pigs and dog won’t bother to step into the backyard to do their business. The only function of our outdoor space is as an open concept bathroom. With snow on the ground and lethal temperatures, the animals declined to use the facilities. I tried to tempt the pigs outdoors by sprinkling their dinner in a patch of yard where I shoveled off the snow, but they wouldn’t even step out to eat. You know it’s cold if a pig will turn down food. We learned during a blizzard last year that the pigs will hold it all day if they don’t feel like going outside. Then, when they’re at the bursting point, they’ll wait for us to let them into our carpeted dining room before they unleash the flood. I wasn’t falling for it this time. When they declined to go for the food, I tried to shoo them out myself. After that failed, I turned on the vacuum. It’s the only thing in this world they truly fear. In seconds, they were out the doggy door and onto the enclosed back porch. From there, I had to chase them out one more door onto the newly established Indiana tundra. Once they were out there, I stayed with them to make sure they ate and used the open-air outhouse. When I used to imagine what adulthood would look like, I didn’t think it would include nearly freezing to death while waiting for two pigs to pee. Still, I’d rather do that than clean up one more mess on the carpet. When we finally have it removed, we’ll need hazmat suits.
In between these forced bathroom runs, I did something I’ve never done in all my previous years of swine ownership: I locked the pigs in the house. The doggy door to the back porch is actually in a homemade wooden “screen” door at the back of the pig room. (Yes, all normal houses have a pig room. Get over it.) The room also has a large, ornate wooden door that always stays open so the pigs can get to the doggy door. I never cut a hole in the ornate door since it’s been here far longer than me and I didn’t want to ruin it. It would be nice if there were one thing in this house I didn’t actively make worse just by being here. Betsy did research at the local library and discovered our house was built by the treasurer of a bank. That explains the grand staircase, dangling crystal light fixtures, and elaborate inlaid flooring. I let two pigs walk around the place. Plus four kids, who probably cause more damage. That’s why I left the door out of the pig room intact.
My reluctance to defile that final feature of my house turned out to be a blessing. At the start of the cold snap, the mere presence of the doggy door dropped the temperature in the back of the house by ten degrees. That thin plastic flap isn’t rated to keep out the full might and fury of the North Pole. I closed the big wooden door, locking the pigs inside. The house instantly got warmer, but the pigs were trapped. Now they couldn’t go outside even if they wanted to, which they didn’t. Three times a day, I repeated the ritual of opening the door and chasing them outside. It was awful and inconvenient, and I thought all pigs and humans involved would die of frostbite, but we made it through the whole holiday weekend without a single accident in the house. By the end, the younger pig, Luna, would even let me know when she had to go by banging on the baby gate at the front of the room. She was on board with the process even if it didn’t appear to be in her best interest. Stockholm Syndrome also exists in animals.
It might seem like I’m being melodramatic, and maybe I am. I’m too old for actual drama, so I’ll always default to the mellow kind. For some readers, a negative forty degree windchill might not seem that cold. In Minnesota, that’s grilling weather. In Canada, it’s time to visit the old swimming hole. I’ve spent portions of my life in colder climates than the one I’m in now, but no matter where I live, I’ll never be used to temperatures low enough to freeze a polar bear. I keep my house at seventy all winter, and if it goes even one degree below that, I’ll wear a parka at the dinner table. Other people around here are made of tougher stuff than me. Our friends Peter and Lila sometimes keep their house at sixty-five degrees in the winter. For reference, that’s the temperature at which yetis put on a sweater. If you don’t cover up all the way at night, you wake up with icicles on your eyebrows. You don’t have a house; you have a live-in freezer. I don’t know what the utility bill savings are from dipping down those extra five degrees, but they can’t possibly be worth it. You sliced forty bucks off your electric bill but made a quarter of a million dollar house unfit for human habitation. I’m not a numbers guy, but somehow, I don’t think the math on that decision works out.
Cold is relative. In the fall, I thought I was going to die the first time the temperature dropped into the sixties. And then the fifties. And the forties. At each subsequent temperature bracket, I would swear that was the coldest it could ever possibly get, and then things got worse. Going from a warm fall day to a lukewarm fall day made me feel like Han Solo being frozen in carbonite. But now that I’ve experienced the kind of cold reserved for the Book of Revelations, all those autumn temperatures don’t seem so bad. A week ago, it was in the thirties here. Skipping all the other temperature categories to reach apocalyptic cold made the end-of-the-world temperatures seem even more unbearable. Now, the entire country is about to get temperature whiplash in the other direction. Around here, it’s supposed to be in the fifties by the end of the week. That will feel like shorts weather. Someone break out the Slip ‘n Slide. Of course those temperatures won’t stick around, and we’ll return to real winter soon enough. I look forward to complaining every step of the way back down.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Stay warm out there—until the end of the week, when you’ll need to turn on the air conditioning.
James
The Coldest Day