A Cold Day

Once upon a time, during the cold, cold, winter of 1995/1996, there was a period of time during which, three nights were colder than -50 and several nights were colder than -45.......and we're talking temperature here, not wind chill.

One of the more humorous things that I've seen in the whole of my life occurred during that winter, but no one has seen the humor in it quite the same way I did. You see, at that time I had a couple of fairly major cold related problems (which I wont get into here) as did my friend Mick, at Back O' the Moon Resort. After working outside continuously at our respective resorts for virtually a night and a day, we finally had most of our problems under control. The next day, when things had settled down a bit, I went over to his place to see how he was doing. He had given up on keeping one of his cabins open for the rest of the winter due to his inability to keep a sewer line from freezing, and he was almost finished with the job of shutting it down. The last thing he had to do to shut the cabin down was to pour RV anti-freeze into the traps under the sinks, the shower, and the toilet, which he was about to do when I arrived.

As I drove into the resort I saw him go into the house, so I walked in shortly after he did. When I got in, I noticed that he was putting two one-gallon jugs of anti-freeze into a sinkfull of hot water. I said "Mick, what are you doing that for?", and his reply was "I have to thaw this stuff out so I can use it". The two jugs had been out in his shed and had frozen solid even though it said in big letters on the front of each jug "PROTECTION TO 50 DEGREES BELOW ZERO". The funny thing was that his reply contained no surprise, no humor, no sarcasm, no anger, no sadness, and no disgust. In fact, it had no emotion whatsoever......he simply answered my question. Due to its length and severity, we had become numb (no pun intended) to the cold and to the problems it was causing. It was simply "business as usual". To me, his lack of emotion in that situation was funny, and I laughed for a long time.

I've told that story to several "down south" people, and in every case they were either totally amazed at how cold it was, or they saw humor in the fact that the anti-freeze had frozen (a fact in which I saw no humor whatsoever). But none of them saw humor in Mick's lack of emotion. Oh well, I guess humor, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

And they all lived happily ever after!

The End