Windy city, not particularly snowy though

Home for the holidays, I naturally caught up with tons of people I hadn’t seen since going off to college. The go-to small talk adults initiated with me was whether Chicago was as cold as they had heard. My honest answer was that I didn’t find it particularly cold. But it felt wrong to dispel them of whatever mythos there is in city stereotypes, so I’d follow up, invariably, with the remark that it was very windy though. And then their eyes would light up and they’d eagerly chime in, oh it’s the windy city, isn’t it, and I’d nod and smile and say yes it is indeed. But that I found it windy was a bald-faced lie—like the cold, the wind had been disappointing.

I was, to be honest, terribly disappointed with the Chicago winter. I think much of my life I have been chasing the blizzards of my youth, when sparkling snow covered my front lawn, when opening the creaky garage door revealed a fourth, whiter wall, when school was regularly cancelled and I’d sleep in until eleven and trek like Shackleton to my neighbor’s house through snow deeper than I was tall to spend the day sledding and snowman fashioning and snowball fighting. The memories were certainly embellished—I was an elementary schooler back then, so everything was a giant in my eyes—but they were real in so far as a memory is real.

Certainly no snowfall during my time boarding in Windsor lived up to that nostalgia. I was friends with a handful of Russians, and I distinctly recall a long walk in the fields behind my school after a snowstorm—the only one of the year. We followed something not too dissimilar to a desire path, one carved by golf carts weaving around the lines of soccer fields, and in their tracks accumulated water had frozen into a devilishly slippery ice. Along our walk we playfully shoved each other and slipped, sometimes when shoved and other times while shoving, falling on our backbones with muffled thuds, and it was a ball of a time, our journey terminating by the riverside under a grove of trees where jostling a branch dropped ten pounds of snow on the ground. But how could this live up to our youth? I remember they reminisced about the incomparable snowfall back in Russia. I’m sure Boston couldn’t compare, but the sentiment rang just as true for me.

Since moving from Boston, which I conveniently demarcate as leaving my youth, I had never seen proper snow. Five years in New York, three in Connecticut, and not one good blizzard. But supposedly New England just hadn’t had good snowfall this decade, and Chicago, well, Chicago was in the Midwest.

I hoped there’d be something magical here: while other schools sent me shirts and hats in my admissions packages, Chicago sent me a scarf. And in every “items to pack” list they gave, there was a whole section dedicated to winter wear. Expect the legendary Chicago winter, it implied, and I was nothing but earnest. There was a week where my entire reels algo was clips of Lake Michigan covered in frighteningly large chunks of sleet grey ice crashing into one another over inky water, as if in the wake of an icebreaker, a sight I was incredibly excited to see with my own eyes. But winterim came and went without much fuss. Oh there were like two nice days of snow, but nothing to cancel Christmas over. It wasn’t powdery and made for terrible snowballs. The Chicago Winter was capital L Lame, a weak and pathetic thing. And so I retreated home believing it overhyped. But I had, evidently, judged too hastily.

~

Today, with wind chill, it was negative thirty degrees. Seventy degrees colder than LA, fifty degrees colder than NYC. Trees across Illinois are exploding from the cold. I’ve received upwards of two dozen emails warning me that any more than five minutes of exposed skin will mean frostbite. And Housing warned us last night that leaving a window open might burst our entire piping system. My humanities teacher, the pedagogical counterpart of a truant, cancelled class—which, though expected, still made my day. Bless him. Chicago cancelled all public schools citywide, and our very own Lab Schools cancelled too. But my Analysis teacher had no such intentions. And so I set out from my dorm this morning wearing four layers, and, as one might guess, it was not nearly enough.

I entered the vestibule bracing myself for the cold, and it wasn’t that bad actually. For a brief moment, I was almost disappointed—I had expected more. And then I opened the front doors, and it turned out the vestibule had been incredibly well heated. By the time I had walked down the steps to the sidewalk my legs were freezing (it would be terribly emasculating to wear thermal leggings but I may have to invest). I hobbled over to the Divvy rack to unlock a bike, and the scanning of a QR code unfortunately required more dexterity than my gloves could allow, and so I bit the middle finger of my glove to take it off, exposing my poor hand to the outside. My fingers immediately half-froze, so unlocking my phone was a trial in and of itself. Eventually, though, I managed to get a bike activated, and as I swung my leg over the bike the denim of my already stiff jeans crackled. And then the journey began.

Biking parallel to the Midway puts one in a wind tunnel, and, in particular, one wherein the wind blows from where I’m going and goes whence I came. I missed the low, the baseline negative thirty degrees, since I set out fairly late (owing to my cancelled hum class), but I’m more than positive that biking into that wind subjected me to the temperature at which Celsius and Fahrenheit meet. The wind slashed brutally against my face, blowing my hood off, and so my ears were completely numb after a minute. I haven’t used the word frigid in a long time—it feels like the big vocab word in a fourth-grade essay—but god it was frigid. After docking my bike, I took off my hood, inadvertently brushing my hand against my hair, and realised that from the back, evidently not properly dried after showering, hung small icicles.

Last night, D. and I discovered out of the corner of his window we can spy the corner of A.’s room. We called him up, planning to open both windows and shout to one another. But within a second of cracking open our window, the silicone border meant to keep out dust and debris was ripped off by the wind, shaking ferociously like a flag in a hurricane. We shouted at the top of our lungs and could scarcely here A. over the wind.

I read a nice tweet yesterday noting that “[w]hen you are learning to draw, a key skill is attending to the shapes of things before you mentally turn them into objects. There is a similar skill in writing where you have to learn to hold a nonverbal idea in your head so that you have space to choose accurate words for it.” I don’t think that skill is applicable when describing the wind we heard outside last night—there do not exist accurate adjectives for it. We typically say wind is howling or roaring or whipping—anthropomorphising it as a beast which lashes out periodically in gusts. But what I struggled to fall asleep to last night was nothing of the sort. The noise was continuous, a creature of infinite stamina. It didn’t modulate in volume whatsoever, and if it had been quieter I am sure I would have quickly shelved it as white noise. Why would anyone choose to live here?

The tragic part of it all is that there isn’t any snow. This Chicago winter seems to be precisely what it is purported to be, but whatever that is certainly is not the winter of my youth. It’s cold, windy, and miserable, yet we have not a snowflake to show for it. White noise. I can only hope that February brings us delightful blizzards in which I can order Doordash and tip $1. But oh well. I will hole up this weekend in the lounge watching the Pats knock on wood murder the Broncos, so all is good.