made heroic efforts to bring as much of the world as they could to their students. But as the rural areas lost population, the schools were collapsing into themselves: consolidating, cutting budgets, offering less. The same was true of every other institution that might sustain a community, from hospitals to hardware stores to police departments to churches.
There were barely three hundred people in our town, only five thousand in the entire county. Our town had no doctor, no dentist, no police officer. The nearest hospital was twelve miles away when we came; after it closed, the nearest was fifteen, with a doctor so dismissive of people’s complaints he was known as “Doctor Death.” The sheriff’s office, which had to do more and more of the law enforcement, was fifteen miles away.
One year, on Halloween, all the street lights were shot out. Another year, somebody shot up the bank: the bank tellers had their picture taken for the local paper pointing to the hole in the wall, as they might have done when Wyatt Earp was still alive. (By the time we left, the bank was gone, too.)
But the thing that really isolated you was the winter, especially the extreme cold.
I was up one January night, unable to sleep. We had an old mercury thermometer just outside the kitchen window. (Because of the heat loss through the window, the thermometer would usually register a little higher than the actual temperature.) To torture myself mentally, I tried to see how cold it was, but I couldn’t make out the mercury in the tube. I got a flashlight and shined it through the window. There was no mercury: it had dropped below the forty below line and was huddled in the bottom of the tube, like a wounded animal.
It could be forty below zero for weeks. People made a valiant attempt to keep their lives going but it took a real effort to leave the house for anything but the most necessary trips and, by the end of January, the isolation would be getting to everybody.
We did a funeral one spring after a horrible cold spell. During the funeral lunch, we were talking to some of the relatives who had come quite a distance. The conversation, as it often does in Minnesota, turned to winter weather. One of the out-of-town ladies shrugged and said, “Well, cold is cold. So you just dress up. What’s the big deal?”
The locals stared at her in disbelief. One said, “You don’t go outside much, do you?” Another said, “And you sure aren’t from around here.”
It’s hard to convey how devastating extreme cold can be to someone who’s never experienced it. Once you’re used to northern Minnesota, ten below is fairly tolerable with a good parka, but twenty below makes your parka feel like a windbreaker. At forty below, that same parka will feel like a light shirt, and you had better respect how deadly the temperature has become. People that knew more than I knew, or wanted to know, said there was a corresponding impact at sixty below.
All the cars had engine-block heaters, and we plugged them in if we wanted the motor to turn over in the morning. We never left the driveway without sleeping bags and a survival kit in the trunk. In the worst cold, you had to put a cover over your radiator grille so your engine wouldn’t freeze. The car heater could barely keep the frost off the inside windows.
I remember the sensation of going in and out: having that first cold breath scorch your lungs and feeling the chill come right through your clothes; then, after being numbed and pushed inside yourself outside, having the heat blast over you when you entered a building, getting groggy from the warmth.
I remember lingering in gas stations, enjoying that instant camaraderie of all the poor souls that had to be on the road, laughing at how bad it was, asking about road conditions.
Because it wasn’t just the cold that hung on: the snow might cover the ground for six months, from the beginning of October to the end of March. Of course, before and after those dates, there might be snowfalls and ice storms that would linger for a few days.
Late one evening, I was coming back from a hospital visit. I stopped for gas and ran into one of the men who worked for the town, plowing the streets, mowing city property, doing general maintenance. He had moved to the area to manage the hardware store before it went out of business and ended up being stranded. It had been an unusually bad year for snow, even by our standards, and we were, a bit hysterically, joking about how bad it might get and where we would put the snow if it was still coming in June.
“Don’t laugh,” he said. “I’ve seen it snow in June. In fact, one year we had such miserable weather, I was standing right here—right here pumping gas—on the Fourth of July. We’d been out watching the fireworks. I looked up and there was snow coming down. Not much, melted right away, but there they were: snowflakes on the Fourth of July. So I’ve seen snow in this country every damned month of the year.”
But you could laugh about that; it was the deep winter that was frightening. Driving home late, ice on the roads, snow falling through your headlights, no other cars in sight, miles between one town and the next, and—in the early years—no cell phones, no car navigation systems, none of the connections we cling to now, you appreciated what a tiny, vulnerable organism you were, how much your small spark of life was up against.
And above you, in that clear, frigid air, was the dark beauty of the universe, with hardly any ground lights to blind you to it. Before those nights in Minnesota, I had never seen so many stars so clearly. Especially after a long drive, or after a long walk in the summer, your night vision would get better and you could see the clusters and clumps of the galaxies as you never can in the city. And it was one of the better places on earth to see the light shows of the northern lights. I had read about them but, seeing them through the windshield for the first time, I couldn’t believe what I was looking at.
That was where I learned to identify the constellations. I got the book on the stars written by H. A. Rey, who wrote the Curious George books our kids loved, and I had a great time running in and out, trying to match diagrams to reality.
At our bigger church, which we lived next to, there was a path on the west side, going from the parsonage to the parking lot and the main entrance. I tried to keep it clear in the winter, and one of my indelible memories is walking to night meetings between piles of snow four feet high, looking right at the North Star, and, coming home a couple of hours later, looking up at Orion.
But, obviously, it was easier to stay out and stare up at the sky in the summer. I felt triumphant one night when I could finally pick out Hercules and the Serpent Holder. I would lie on our front lawn, with its gentle slope down to the highway, and lose myself in the vast beauty of those long-travelling beams of light that still look like points on a dome. The universe became my friend. A cold and distant friend, but a peaceful and undemanding one, ever present, ever welcoming. Lying on my back, looking up happily, losing myself, I could feel the deep kinship of matter that we’ve taught ourselves: the stars, the earth and my breathing flesh all made of the same stuff.
On my worst days, those would be good moments.
Beating the Bounds
I had, at seminary, an eccentric church history professor who never came to class without his copy of the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. He loved finding a pretext to consult this thick tome—some obscure ceremony or odd breakaway sect—and would read the entire entry aloud, giggling delightedly. He thought all pastors of the church should have a copy on their desks, so I bought one. It’s still sitting in front of me, still regularly consulted.
One Saturday, I was looking for an odd detail to spice up my sermon and, for some reason I can no longer remember, looked up the article on “Beards, Clerical.”
A
