Dave Wood

These days I’m not waiting for yet another snowfall. Rain is fine, but more snow is for the birds (apologies to Sarah!) and the snow removal companies. Same as last year, we were unsuccessful in finding a hardy lad (or lass) to shovel our sidewalks, so we ended up signing a contract with a company whose address is Chippewa Falls which was happy to sign us up. Of course, they charge more than the golden days of my youth, when it was 75 cents for a corner lot, 50 cents for a shorter area, driveways included.

This winter, when 4 inches fell, our new company sent us a bill for close to $300, that includes of course a fee for 25 pounds of de-icer. It’s a little cheaper if less than 4 inches fall, so every week, we hold our breath when the first flake wafts down onto our sidewalk.

Recently my friend Charley Vanasse shared with me a Pioneer Press column he found in his late father’s trove of archives, which reminded me of tall wintry tales of the past about the dangers of moving to wintry Wisconsin.

Remember the contest held by the Burlington Wisconsin Liars Club (which may be ongoing), but one I remember best came years ago when the winner remembered, “It was so cold we buried the corpses vertically with a pile driver.”

And of course, there are tales of Paul Bunyan and U of Minnesota prof Carol Ryrie Brink, who created a more petite battler of the weather in nearby Dunn County, Miss Caddie Woodlawn.

Entire books have been written about the Armistice Day blizzard of 1940, including my tale about playing “funeral” burying frogs frozen dead in the lily pond behind our apartment at the foot of Plank Hill in Eau Claire, which then came alive in their shoebox coffins when the thaw came. My pals and I managed to inter them in a nearby snowdrift.

But no winter tale can top the yellowed news clipping by roving Pioneer Press reporter Earl Chapin that Charley shared with me:

“OLDSTER SAYS CURRENT WINTERS DON’T HOLD A SNOWFLAKE TO PAST.” “Old fashioned winter,” scoffed Louis Christenson, a retired farmer, who has seen 92 of them. “This generation has never seen an old-fashioned winter. And if they did see one, they wouldn’t believe it. Why one winter I was up to the pineries at St. Croix Falls. It got so cold that one night the mist from the falls froze in the air and stayed there until the sun came up and thawed it out! Back in ’86 it started to snow just like it’s doing now. Big flakes like these but they came down heavier. It snowed all day and all night and when it stopped there was 4 feet deep on the level.

“We didn’t have snowplows. People went on skis to the post office. The snow was so deep people skied over the fences. Folks even went to a wedding on skis. Later it rained and formed a crust on the snow so thick you could drive a team of horses over it. In April the snow was gone and it was replaced with a lake. There were thousands of ducks waiting to be shot but my gun was too little.”

And so it goes for Louis’s tale of woe. As I read about the lack of snowplows, I wonder how much Louis might have paid for removal of his driveway and corner sidewalk if Louis were blessed with an agency such as ours-- and we paid $255 per inch.

I multiplied Louis’s 48 inches by our agency’s per inch charge. It came to $3,072.

All I can say is I’m certainly happy we decided to move to a temperate clime that doesn’t hold a snowflake to that of Mr. Christenson’s.