“Jeez! Cold, eh?” The man said to his friend while sitting his coffee down on the table before tossing the hood of his fur-lined parka back and taking a seat.
“Yeah, damn near froze to death diggin’ the car out this mornin’,” his companion whose own heavy jacket was draped on the back of his chair and whose thick winter gloves lay on the table beside a steaming Double Double (two cream, two sugars coffee), replied.
I turned away from the two men so as not to be seen while I tried in vain to stifle a hearty chuckle.
It was the beginning of my second full week in Owen Sound, Ontario, where just before sunrise the second lake effect snow storm in less than a week had dumped an additional 7 cm/3 in. of snow on top of the previous storm’s 35 cm/14 in. and the mercury was hovering around a very chilly -7°C/19°F.
What I found funny about the exchange that greeted me as I was enjoying a hot cup of Tim Horton’s tea and a Canadian Maple, sort of a Boston Creme donut with maple—what else—instead of chocolate frosting on top, was not that these two men, who almost certainly had spent their entire lives enduring Canadian winters, found a snowy, frigid January morning worthy of conversation and complaint, but rather how all too familiar a scene it was.
My full time residence is in Palm Springs, California, which lies at the western edge of the Colorado Desert region of the Great Sonoran Desert. In other words it’s about as far away as you can get from lake effect snows and freezing temps and still be in North America.
As a writer, I regularly pack up my laptop and head into one of downtown Palm Springs coffee shops to soak up local color, caffeine, and get some work done and where exchanges, like the following, aren’t uncommon.
“Christ! It’s hot today,” one patron will say to another crossing his cargo shorts-clad, otherwise bare legs under the table before giving his T-shirt a tug or two in an effort to swirl some cool air around his torso.
“Yep,” his equally lightly dressed companion will say, “it could hit 116 [47°C] today.”
If it’s early enough in the season you may also hear, “Any fool tried it yet?”
The “it” they’re referring to is attempting to fry an egg on the hood of a car or the sidewalk, a favorite pastime of newcomers to desert life.
Later that same week I got a phone call from my friend Alex in Los Angeles, and, of course, the first thing he asked was, “So what’s winter like in Canada? How are you holding up in the cold?”
“Oddly enough,” I told him, “it’s not at all unlike being in Palm Springs.”
Even though we weren’t video chatting, I could tell by the long pause that he must have been sitting there in balmy LA quizzically trying to figure out what the hell I meant.
“How so?” he eventually asked with an air of hesitation in his voice as if half expecting me to say something like I’d turned tail and headed back down south.
“Well,” I began, “people, who’ve probably spent their entire lives here sit around and complain about the snow and the cold as if it was the first winter they’d ever seen, just like people back in Coachella Valley sit around and bitch about the heat like it was something they never expected to find living in a desert.”
“I see,” said Alex. “What about you? How are you coping with the cold?”
“Well,” I continued, “like I said, life here’s not all that much different than the way I lived it in Palm Springs.”
More cautious silence at the other end of the line. I pressed on.
“In Palm Springs when temperatures hit the hundreds, you stay out of the sun and indoors, in cool air-conditioned comfort. When you do go out, you dress, or in the case of Palm Springs, undress accordingly.
“Here, when things are at their coldest, you stay indoors where it’s warm and toasty, and when you do have to go out you dress accordingly.
“Same problem, different wardrobe.”
