Around 11 p.m. Saturday, a car full of teen-agers drove into a highway pull-out at 26 Mile and parked just long enough for the kids inside to get out and dance around to some loud music in the parking lot.
Cheap thrills, for sure, but small-town kids understand that even cheap thrills beat no thrills at all. Adults are no different. For a decade or more, dozens of us would drive to Whitehorse, Y.T. in mid-February for the two tonics most intoxicating to small-town Alaskans: Live music and strangers.
Like parched bedouins discovering a spring, we would dive into the Yukon College gym around 11 p.m. Friday, where some loud band from Toronto or Vancouver was liberating the crowd from its mid-winter torpor at the Frostbite Music Festival.
The Yukoners were primed to let it rip and a weekend drunk on sunny days and wild nights was almost enough to tide us over through the eternity and misnomer that is springtime in the North.
We are now slogging out the last months of our longest winter. Not counting two warm, wet spells posing as summers, this winter has lasted through two years, three waves of the plague, a fatal landslide and an attempt to overthrow the federal government.
If you feel exhausted in every way possible, that’s understandable. If you feel resigned, that’s okay, too. If you’ve been overeating, you are healthy. The human animal is programmed to binge on fats during times of stress and impending doom. Fat guarantees survival through drought, flood, war, pestilence and other catastrophes.
That rubber tire around your waist may come in handy.
I was speaking on the phone to a middle-aged Native woman this week. She said to me, “I’m Tlingit. I’m from here. I grew up here and lived here all my life and let me tell you, this has been a long winter.”
When the people who are genetically adapted to this climate tell you it’s bad, you can take that to the bank.
Winter’s duration has been compounded many times over by fear of COVID, social distancing, and a general prohibition on things we once considered fun but now recognize as essential. Perhaps a silver lining is we won’t again take those things for granted.
There are 12 days remaining in February, then another two months before warmer weather starts taking hold, but even that’s not etched in stone. In 2021, the mercury didn’t reach 60 until the third week in May and didn’t top 70 after the first day of August.
One 20-year resident pulled up roots last summer, saying she’d be damned if she’d spend the rest of her life waiting around for better weather.
But that’s what we do here. We wait around for better weather.
If sometime during the long wait, you discover excitement, fulfillment or something more satisfying than a greasy cheeseburger and a deep sleep, tip off your neighbor to your discovery. That would be a Christian thing to do.