Spring in Wisconsin

I was worried that Wisconsin would give her the wrong impression. 

My wife’s niece, a high school junior, is visiting this weekend to have a look at the UW. She’s from California. In fact, she lives a stone’s throw from Stanford. In Menlo Park, 45 degrees counts as “cold” and a day of rain registers as really bad weather. Her experience of snow is the kind you get at Lake Tahoe. 

My niece has no experience with ice-mud or those black burgs that sit weeping in strip mall parking lots until mid-May. She doesn’t know about the sand and grit that lay around on streets in March and April before the city gets around to sweeping it up after we’re safely beyond the snow times. She has no appreciation for the shades of gray and brown that define “spring” in Wisconsin. 

So, I was more than a little concerned when forecasts, two weeks out, predicted sunny 60 degree weather for this weekend. Wisconsinites know how cruel those days can be. All of a sudden leaves pop. Everything becomes a gentle shade of kelly green set against a perfect blue sky and some fluffy clouds. There’s a brisk breeze but the sun is warm. If a person were to visit Wisconsin on a day like that they’d come away with the wrong impression. They might leave a day before the storm that dumps a foot of snow on us and resets the clock back a couple of weeks. 

A person might tell her friends back in California how lovely the Midwest is and then make life-altering decisions and pack up the old family car and drive out here and move into Witte Hall and experience the also fine weather of September and tell everyone that her uncle is a just a grumpy old man (which he is on most matters) and what’s not to love about Wisconsin? 

And then it’ll be February. And then March. And then April. And then she’ll know. She’ll understand what the “dark midnight of the soul” truly means. She’ll be forced to confront reality, not to mention mortality. Things die. And while they are reborn, it’s only after month after soul-crushing month of darkness. And even when life does return, it’s in fits and starts and there are more fits than starts. It snows in April and the snow melts as it hits the pavement, but it’s coming so fast that the melting can’t keep up and so slush piles up on the streets and the slush is shoved into banks by city plows and there it sits in slowly, oh so slowly, diminishing ridges of black slush-ice until it’s finally gone but leaving a residue of grit.

All of which is to say that I was more than pleased when the forecast changed, as it is apt to do around these parts. The 60 degrees and sunshine steadily eroded each day I checked. Now today we’ll have snow/slush showers and 40 degrees while she’ll be touring the campus (excellent!). Oh, and a nice stiff wind, too. 

Don’t get me wrong. Dianne and I would love to have her here. And, as a Wisconsin and Madison booster, I’d love to have a bright kid from California coming here instead of the other way around. But she needs to have her eyes wide open. This isn’t California. These are the real meteorological mean streets of the Midwest. 

For those of us who grew up here we understand that all this builds character. It doesn’t kill us – though it tries really hard. No, it makes us stronger. They make brandy in California just for Wisconsin on days like this.

Arizona is another one of her choices. Arizona. They say it’s a dry heat. They’re lying. It’s just damn hot. At least we’re honest here. It’s cold. But it’s a damp, dark cold. In fact, “cold” doesn’t begin to describe what it is. We need to invent a new word or phrase for it. Coldespair? 

I know. This is poor salesmanship on my part. But if we’re really going to sift and winnow we need large doses of brutal honesty. Wisconsin’s icy-muddy winter-springs strip away all the pretense. All illusions are ground out of us. Life is full of days like this, metaphorically in other places, but literally in Wisconsin.

If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.