“Notice I didn’t specify what kind of doom, so no matter what happens, I predicted it. How very wise of me.” – Christopher Paolini
Here in north-western Montana, winter is our season that weeds out the weenies and the whiners. After several months of False Spring, perhaps winter is finally upon us but, you just can’t tell. No matter what winters you’ve experienced here in the past, you can never really predict what’s going to come. An unexpected gust of warm air, an unwanted wave of moisture, a mixture of a brisk wind carrying solids and liquids. It’s much like expecting a fart and an unexpected SHART occurs instead. I find the older we get, the easier it is to predict and prepare for the unexpected aftermath of weather…and farts. Experience, after all, is the best teacher.
You need a back-up plan when the unexpected event that you expected unexpectedly comes. During a single day we can go from a balmy 45 degrees Fahrenheit with blue skies and sunshine to torrential snow fall and gusting winds of 60 to 80 M.P.H. Why just earlier this week I witnessed our 200 pound pig, named Runty, blowing around our backyard like a tumbleweed. Trees were blowing sideways, knocking out power lines and phone lines for several days.
But thank goodness the Facebook still worked or we wouldn’t be able to regale in the panic and disbelief of those who just moved here after house shopping during the summer months. They clearly had no plan at all, back-up or otherwise, for winter. They’re about to have an expectedly unexpected SHART that they should have had the slightest inkling was remotely possible but didn’t even have a spare pair of underwear on hand.
To be fair though, surviving winter here is a process: You learn as you go or you die trying. My wife, Cindy, and I moved here several years ago. Winter was not new to either one of us. I grew up on the east coast; New Jersey, Washington D.C. where winters can be long and grueling. She and I moved to Montana from northern California just outside of Trukee where they measure snow in yards, not inches. So, yeah, even with that residential resume we may have come here a little cocky about what we were in for.
But we prepared! We asked questions about the seasons, we installed a whole house auto-start generator, we had a tractor with a bucket, a quad with a snowplow attachment, snow tires on our four-wheel drive vehicles, multiple weather apps to prepare for ALMOST every predictable weather outcome… and this is where my little story comes in:
I’m not going to say, compared to me, Nostradamus was an amateur but some of his predictions were wrong. I pretty much bat a thousand as far as my predictions go. I’m great at evaluating situations and determining the most likely outcomes, like a friggin’ mega computer or something. What I’m not good at is physics, apparently, but that should never negate the accuracy of my prophecies.
It was our second winter here in Montana. The first went mostly as predicted. But this particular winter exceeded even its own expectations. Weather apps were useless and The Farmer’s Almanac fell short on this one particular winter as well as all the winters before and after.
The cabin we moved in to was constructed with a Hip and Valley style roof, (imagine two gabled roofs one joined at a perpendicular angle at the center of the other), creating two valleys where the roofs joined. Two steep, metal, slippery, sloping roofs coming together to form a gargantuan snow pile-up. Although predictable, it was completely unexpected. Well, there’s tools to remove that shit but, of all the things we had that prepared us for winter, we didn’t have that. I certainly wasn’t going up on a metal roof to shovel it off either. I think anyone that knows me could accurately predict what would happen if I had tried.
One of the snow-filled valleys was right outside of our very large kitchen bay window. Snow had been sloughing off in thick sheets and piling up just outside the window in an ever-growing mountain range; higher and higher. Just prior to this, obvious and predictable event, the snow-mountain was about four feet high. The peak of this mountain steeply sloped away from the house and there was still about two feet of snow adhering to the entire surface of the roof. For those of you that ARE good at physics, you already know what’s probably going to happen but, that in no way makes me wrong.
Cindy and I both looked at the situation. She made a recommendation and I made my first of two predictions regarding this event. I don’t mean to brag but, both of my predictions were 100 percent correct. But, like that old saying goes; “Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.” In other words, being correct doesn’t always mean you’re right.
Cindy, if you must know, suggested that we carefully remove the snow from the area of the roof above the kitchen window before it slid off. I assessed the situation, and seeing that the weather was going to be warmer starting the next day, predicted flawlessly that the snow would start to melt the next day and we would not have to risk hurting ourselves removing the snow from the roof. So, the next day…
I woke up at 5:30 a.m. preparing to leave for a trip to see my parents. I planned on leaving early and got up to build a fire to get the cabin warm and cozy for Cindy when she woke up at 9:00 a.m. (or earlier as it turned out). Honestly, who doesn’t love to wake up to a nice warm cabin in the freezing cold of winter?
I was still in my underwear crouched down in front of the wood burning stove setting alight the wooden fuel that cast a warm gl… Startled by an ever-increasing rumble that could only be described as a derailed train carrying a dozen trumpeting circus elephants coming towards the cabin? This racket was going on for way too long. The train should have surely hit us by now, the tracks are only two miles away; “What the hell could that be?” The house was shaking and rumbling but the noise was way too loud even for an 11.5 earthquake. It all crescendoed with a loud explosion that blew in through the kitchen window.
In my peripheral vision, (because I was too afraid to look directly at the carnage unfolding), I saw shards of broken glass, curtains and their tethering rod and window sill chachkies and napkins and placemats from the kitchen table blasting through the air across the kitchen like they were shot out of a canon. But the thing I noticed most begrudgingly was the giant ball of snow and ice. Our cabin had just become the Titanic and I was surely going down with the ship. That’s when I made my second accurate prediction for this event; I predicted I was about to hear yet another marital, “I told you so!”
I could hear Cindy stirring upstairs as she groggily came to her senses after being awoken by this expectedly unexpected disaster. I’m still frozen in front of the wood burning stove, realizing the greater urgency for getting this fire going since there’s a gaping hole in the side of our cabin. I was also thinking that I just may have been wrong for the very first time in my life. Cindy called down, “What was that? Did the snow come off the roof and through the kitchen window?” ‘Now how the hell did she come up with that so quickly? Frankly, I was still wondering if I should call BNSF Railways about their circus train.
I heard footsteps in the loft walking towards the balcony overlooking the kitchen and realized I needed to beat Cindy to the scene of the disaster. As I stared at the carnage, there was a convergence of validated predictions that filled me with a certain elation. I noticed that the giant snow boulder was rapidly turning to water on our not-so-waterproof laminate floor. As Cindy looked over the balcony she said, “I told you so!” And, with a flourish, I waved my hand across the wreckage of what was once our kitchen and said, “See! It’s melting, just like I said it would!”
I retrieved a full sheet of plywood from the garage as Cindy cleaned up shards of glass and the ruble of our former kitchen. We screwed the plywood over the freezing cold void where the window used to be. Obviously impressed with my prophetic abilities, Cindy calmy went to the junk drawer, retrieved a Sharpie pen and memorialized my prediction on the plywood with large letters that read, “IT’LL MELT!” Then she took a picture of her testimonial and posted on the Facebook so everyone could revel in our unpreparedness.
So, how do you prepare for the unpredictable weather of N.W. Montana? You don’t! No matter what you do, there will always be an unexpected predictably unpredictable incident.
