Or how about this: Snow begins to fall outside your window one evening. Winds gust to 50 mph creaking and cracking trees and making your house give serious groans. Some 24 hours later, 36.6 inches of snow have accumulated outside, clogging streets and maybe even making it tough to get the door open. (Been there and done that in Houghton, Michigan, January 17, 1950.)
Wild weather is the joy and the peril of living near a freshwater sea that boasts 3 quadrillion gallons of solar-energy conductor and 31,700 square miles over which the air, and thus the weather, can be lake affected.
The wilder the weather, the more we talk about it today and remember it tomorrow. Mark Seeley, University of Minnesota Extension climatologist and author of Minnesota Weather Almanac, says we suffer from MAD – Meteorological Affected Disorder – and savor weather stories the way baseball fanatics accumulate team statistics.
Going MAD is nothing new to our region. “Some of our people have perhaps been too prone to dwell upon the unpleasant weather features of our climate,” Herbert W. Richardson, a Duluth Weather Bureau forecaster wrote in 1914. “When we do have a storm or cold wave of any special consequence, the fact has been advertised far and wide. It is the exceptional that excites comment, and particularly newspaper comment. The average excellence of the climate is accepted as a matter of course.”
Karl Bohnak has proof of our weather fascination. Chief meteorologist for TV6 in Marquette, Karl wrote So Cold a Sky with regional weather stories since the arrival of Europeans. He once did a talk on the Upper Peninsula’s “storm of the century,” a January 1938 blizzard that dumped 3 feet of sand-grainy snow, unleashed 50-mph winds, stranded travelers and caused a fire to threaten downtown Marquette. “People climbed out their second-story windows. It was really a huge event. … It’s the storm up here against which all others are measured.”
So who would go to hear stories about a storm come and gone 80 years ago? “There were 200 people who packed in this room and there were people standing outside,” Karl remembers.
Locals like the bad weather and the stories it brings, he says. “We’re proud of it; we wear it like a badge.”
Read more of this article in the February/March Issue of Lake Superior Magazine.
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