When I was young I had very few Winter Survival Skills. The only real one was that I had the brains of pocket lint, which sometimes can be a definite advantage. I’ve said in other posts that I have an inner mountain man (link: MY MOUNTAIN MAN) who is tough as beef jerky and just as dumb. Even back then, he was with me. There’s a lot to be said for a doughty old man who has the smarts of a thumb tack. It’s the old mind over matter thing: If you don’t have a mind it doesn’t matter.

The advantage of not being too bright is that I didn’t realize how cold it was. This was before the days of wind chills where they took a chilly Twenty degree day and turned it into a twenty below zero Articmageddon. Back then when the thermometer said it was twenty degrees, I foolishly assumed it was twenty degrees. Stupid thermometer. If I had known how cold it really was, I never would have went outside.

I spent a lot of time outdoors in the cold in those days, because there was nothing to do indoors. We didn’t have the internet, video games or cell phones. There was some TV, but nothing in the daytime that any self-respecting young boy would admit to watching. I remember going into the house one afternoon and my mother and two older sisters were sobbing with real tears shining on their cheeks.

“What happened?” I asked. My father was at work, and I panicked thinking something had happened to him.

“Sam got stabbed,” my oldest sister wailed, “and he could die.”

“Oh please God, no,” I said. Fear numbed me. I asked the only question my terror-numbed mind could manage. “Sam who?”

“Sam on Search for Tomorrow,” my sister said indignantly, as if I were the silly one crying over a soap opera. Keep in mind that these were the same people who made fun of professional wrestling fans for getting riled up when Mad Dog Vachon did something nasty. (I don’t know if Sam ever made it, and to this day, I don’t care.)

When I was a kid, the cold didn’t bothered me much, because as I said, I believed the lying thermometer, and I didn’t know it was that cold. Sometimes my fingers or toes would get cold, but eventually they went numb, and I ignored them. I once frostbit my ankle, my pant leg worked up without me knowing and exposed my skin to the bitter ten below zero cold—that’s seven hundred fifty-three below in wind chill. A six-inch patch of skin turned pearly white, red then bluish as if it was bruised and finally sloughed off in thin patches of dried black skin. All the guys thought it was really neat, and all the girls thought it was really gross. When you’re a young teenage boy, it just doesn’t get much cooler than that.

Over the years I’ve learned different rules for surviving in the cold: dress in layers, stay hydrated and avoid sweating or wetting your pants (moisture is not your friend in the cold).  My wife has her own Winter Survival rule: Don’t go outside. Which, considering everything we have that’s inside now, probably makes her smarter than the average bear, especially if it’s a polar bear.

In my new novel A Death in a Snowstorm I take a city boy detective whose total winter survival experience consist of having gone ice fishing once, and I throw him out in the cold and make him spend the night there, and that’s when things start getting interesting. The book is due out February 7. It looks as if they are going to offer it free for awhile if you have Kindle Unlimited. Check it out. Amazon link: A Death in a Snowstorm.

  Joel Jurrens Amazon Author’s page