Temp Position

Winter in the South—at least according to my family still living in Pennsylvania—isn’t all that different from winter “up north,” or at least my part of it. Pop Bare often tells me that whatever the weather is doing here in North Carolina, it’s doing something similar there. That doesn’t surprise me. Our winters have been a little harsher than usual lately, probably because we’re just as vulnerable to those polar vortices that swoop down and leave everything in a Frigidaire state for a week or two, from Canada to Georgia.

I sometimes pine for the winters I remember from childhood, along with the cooler summers, though this may be false remembrance. Summers were hot and humid in Pennsylvania, too—just not as humid as six hundred miles farther south—and winters were colder, but not dramatically so. What really changes isn’t the number on the thermometer as much as the quality of the cold or heat. That difference can feel negligible in the long view, but to people unaccustomed to either extreme, it can be genuinely uncomfortable. I occasionally imagine a place with Yankee summers and North Carolina winters, though I suspect such a place would still require a wardrobe update, if it existed at all.

The Scandinavians have a saying: “There’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothes.” I’m sure it sounds prettier rendered in Swedish or Finnish, but I would very much like these fair-haired northern Europeans to come hang out in North Carolina for a few weeks in late July and see how well their ideology holds. Nils and Sven can come on down, and we’ll peel them off the sidewalk with a human-sized spatula. I’m happy to return the favor and visit Norway in February, though I have serious doubts that anything in my closet would keep me from becoming a Dave-cicle. Fair’s fair.

Despite this, I’ve always wanted to visit the Nordic countries. A fair chunk of my heritage comes from there, and there’s something magnetic about that part of the world. By all accounts, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are lovely—clean cities, kind people, functional governments. Most visitors, however, sensibly avoid going in winter. That season is dark, bitterly cold, and relentlessly snowy. Staying inside becomes less a preference than a necessity. Even with my “Yankee” upbringing, I’m not prepared for that kind of cold. If my Nordic kin couldn’t handle a North Carolina summer, I’m not going to feel bad about expiring from hypothermia in Oslo.

I think about the weather the way farm people do—because what else is there to think about when you spend your days riding the back of a mule, caught between earth and heaven, dependent on whatever the sky decides to do? When people like that meet, they talk about the weather. I do it too. Every time I talk to Pop Bare, he asks what it’s doing here, and we spend a solid ten minutes discussing local conditions. It’s just what we do.

What I’m usually thinking about in all of this is relief. When I watch shows set in California or Montana, I imagine summers that are actually tolerable. I once even entertained the idea of living on the mercilessly flat Canadian plains—nothing but wind and grass. A truly stupid television show set there made me think August might be pretty clement: mid-70s, no humidity, a steady breeze to keep the Canadian super-sucker skeeters at bay. I could seriously dig that. Even if it crept into the low 90s, the lack of humidity would make it survivable. Eventually the sun would go down, and the idea of needing a hoodie or windbreaker to watch a summer concert past dusk feels like a dream.

Instead, if we decide to see a band here in the summer, I’ve usually changed my shirt three times just getting ready. By the time we arrive, lugging chairs and a cooler, I’m already soaked. Gods help us if it’s one of those North Carolina nights when the breeze has taken vacation and every leaf in the Piedmont hangs limp. It puts me in mind of the cooler summer evenings I remember from Pennsylvania.

A few years ago, while visiting my brother, I got sunburned helping him with chores during the day. That night, lying in the grass watching Independence Day fireworks, I was chilled to the bone. That’s the kind of summer I remember fondly. If someone asked me whether it was hot or cold enough when I lived in Pennsylvania, I’d probably laugh and say I was just fine. Here, it’s never cold enough and always too hot, and I suspect it always will be.

Here’s the thing, though: I love North Carolina. If the summers were truly unbearable, I’d have figured out a way back north by now. Fall and spring more than make up for summer, and truth be told, I’ve even come to like our summers—at least in theory. I should qualify that: I like summertime; I don’t always like being out in it. I am usually miserable when it’s hot. That’s not changing. One thing it guarantees is that I won’t move any farther south.

Once, while visiting family in Louisiana in August, I got so impossibly hot that I couldn’t cool down until we were halfway back to North Carolina. The swamp-laden, alligator-and–water-moccasin heat left me faint and ill for days. On another trip, in December, we went to see the Panthers play the Saints in New Orleans. On December 29th, it was 84 degrees and sunny. No, thank you.

Traveling has taught me how relative all of this is. In Houston one Thanksgiving, it was seventy degrees and balmy, and I walked downtown in shorts and a T-shirt while locals bundled up like a nor’easter was coming. Years later, in upstate New York in October, men parking cars in thirty-degree weather wore shorts and light jackets while I shivered, underdressed and underprepared. Everyone calibrates differently.

A couple of weeks ago, Micki and I went to Hanging Rock State Park for a short hike along the Indian Creek trail. It was cold and blustery, stuck in the thirties, though the sun was bright. We bundled up, descended to the waterfalls, and climbed back out, and by the time we neared the ranger station I was peeling off layers to cool down. We followed Micki’s father’s hiking rule: dress in peelable layers so you don’t sweat yourself into danger. It felt good to get back in the car and turn on the heat, but we were never in any real trouble.

Two weeks later, we stood outside a downtown theater waiting to see a cover band, and it was seventy-two degrees. In January. The next day, while taking down Christmas lights, I had to keep going inside to add layers as the temperature dropped. By bedtime, it was twenty-nine degrees with wind gusts near thirty miles an hour. Twenty-four hours earlier, it might as well have been May. That’s North Carolina. If you don’t like the weather, wait twenty minutes.

I’d rather not be so hot in the summer, and I’d rather not worry about frostbite in the winter. All things considered, I think we’re in a pretty good position. The nice thing about traveling is that you get to come back home, where—even if I’m going to complain about the discomfort—I at least know what to expect.