And the cold remained...

Please spare a moment to glance at this interesting article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8445831.stm. Especially towards the end, a few good points are made - points which I've had in mind for the past month or so:

"In the town Roros, in central Norway, it has been -40C the last two nights. I have not heard of schools closing and the roads are for the most free [...] Why do the English have this problem every year?[...] I drive my car normally on ice and snow."

Indeed: it's an article pondering the recent cold snap across much of the Northern part of our beloved (?) Globe - and the havoc it has been wrecking on much of society - in the US as in Belgium, the Netherlands and, of course, England.


Ever since the snow started coming down in December, a regular morning feature on the radio has been the reading out of an ever-lengthening list of schools that were "delayed" or "shut". Pardon me for not understanding what a "delayed" school is, but shutting a school because there's a foot (at the very most two) of snow,... I don't get it. Surely in the land of hummers and trucks (remember, this is West Virginia, the Mountain State: your average car is not a VW Beetle), a few inches of snow wouldn't stop you.

What it does stop, of course, are bicycles: needless to say the one good bike path in the county (the one right between my home and my work) turned into an ice-based scale model of the Himalayas late last year - and of course no one has cleaned it up. Now I've ridden on plenty of slippery surfaces and my balance is outstanding - in Sweden I biked a whole winter through and while I lost balance many times, I only hit the ground twice - down here, however, that doesn't work because either the snow is so thick (because noone has ever cleared any of it away) that the drag it produces literally grinds you to a halt, or because the snow has been stamped into an icy surface with much more surface area than the geoid it is imposed upon. (i.e. it's spiky instead of flat.) Keeping your balance while slipping on a flat plane of ice - however slippery - is easy. Keeping your balance on a 30° sideways slope is practically impossible.

So my 15-minute bike ride has now become a 50-minute hike, ploughing through snow and ice and working up quite a sweat however cold the temperatures are (granted, we've hardly reached as low as -13°). On the bright side: these 50 minutes leave me plenty of time to listen to teach-yourself-German podcasts, so if winter persists, I might actually know more than "Hallo" and "Tschüß" when I do move.

In fact, come to think of it - for all the school closures and supposed havoc reported in the news, I can hardly think of any negative side to the weather - the land looks great, it is neither too hot nor too humid, the trail is blissfully deserted,... I guess the only problem is I cannot go for runs anymore, but really I have only been provided with the perfect excuse :-)