The winter of 2014

While I certainly can’t stand the cold or snow, I always seem to be the person saying, “oh this isn’t bad,” or “this is barely any snow.”

I know it stems from my upbringing in Wisconsin and my subsequent college life in northern Wisconsin.

The worst winter I’ve experienced was the 2013/2014 winter while I was living in Eau Claire and going to college.

Conveniently, my husband Patrick, who was my boyfriend at the time, got to spend the winter in San Diego. Granted he was in Marine Corps basic training, so he probably wasn’t having much fun either.

The UW-Eau Claire campus is divided by a giant hill, known creatively as “the hill.” This separates upper campus and lower campus. Almost all resident halls are on upper campus while the academic buildings are on lower campus.

This unfortunately means it’s a decent trek to get from your dorm to your classroom, probably around three-quarters of a mile. Going to class isn’t bad, it’s coming back up the hill that’s no fun. People purposely create their schedule to limit the number of times they have to walk the hill.

Once you get down the hill, you walk next to the Chippewa River. Students with classes in the music buildings have to take the bridge across the river.

As I’m sure everyone here understands, the water makes it colder and windier. There was a social media trend when I was in school called #BRIDGEFACE where you posted a picture of your eyebrows, eyelashes and/or facial hair completely frosted over after making the walk across the bridge.

Winters were always cold and snowy in Eau Claire. It is northern Wisconsin after all. But the January and February of 2014 were the coldest I’ve ever experienced.

Whenever people complain about the cold, I always bring this story up like a grandmother sitting by the fire saying to her grandkids, “Now back in my day...”

That winter we had 30 consecutive days where the high temperature never reached zero degrees. For 30 days, we were in the negatives.

With windchill, we had a week of -60 to -70 degrees. Did the college cancel classes? Only once, and it was governor-mandated.

Now at the time, of course, we were all looking up statistics about frostbite and how dangerous it was to ask college students to walk nearly a mile along a river to get to class. But we made it.

I had a pair of red polka dot footie pajamas. I wore them under my clothes most days. This was topped with long-sleeve shirts, sweatshirts and the winter jacket. The only thing you could see of us were our eyes.

In an attempt to make up for still having classes, the university would keep the temperature high in the academic buildings.

This meant the second you walked into the building, Hibbard was the worst, you would get blasted with a wave of damp heat. People with glasses were blinded and the rest of us began dripping frost.

When you got to your classroom, it began time to dump layers. Off goes the scarf, hat, gloves, winter jacket, top layer of sweatshirt. I sat in my second pair of pants and my long sleeve over my footie pajamas during the lecture.

It was enough to build up a nice sweat by the time class was over and we had to re-dress for the cold.

It wasn’t just the cold, but also the snow. When I started in college, I drove a Saturn SL2. A little car that weighed nothing and sat just above the ground.

I worked at the mall across town, and if there’s another place that isn’t going to close for bad weather, it’s the mall. I remember once taking Clairemont home from a shift and snow was coming down so hard it looked like it hadn’t even been touched with a plow.

This was one of the main roads in Eau Claire, and here we all are sliding and getting stuck. It was more like a parking lot of cars doing doughnuts than it was a main road. I honestly don’t remember how I ended up getting back to campus, but I think I called a coworker to help me get unstuck.

While we still live in the Midwest here in Creston, I’ve never experienced a hard winter here. This year we didn’t even get our first real snowfall until February, and negative temperatures during the day are not frequent.

Don’t get me wrong, I can’t wait for 80 degree days, but it helps me to remember this isn’t that bad.