You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Cold Weather.
It’s 12 degrees this morning.
It’s not Fargo cold, but it’s cold enough.
Cold enough means your teeth chatter and you have trouble keeping your core warm.
Cold enough means your toes hurt no matter how many pairs of socks you have on.
Cold enough means you electric shock yourself by touching your own hair.
That’s cold enough.
Of course I am outside on this cold enough kind of a day.
It’s a country road in the middle of nowhere.
There’s nothing special about this stretch of country.
It’s at the base of a hill and it feels like the wind is driving down the road, being channeled like a log flume of cold.
I feel the wind cut through me like a hundred frozen razor blades.
I’m wearing a scarf and turtle neck and gloves.
Still the wicked wind of the North finds its way through my layers of protection.
If my winter dress were a condom, we would be rejected at the factory.
Adding insult to injury, the highway is busy, with cars and trucks flying by creating their own draft.
Dump trucks and hay wagons lumber down the hill, like luxury liners, pulling into port, creating a tidal wave of cold air.
Nothing says cold like hay wagons and dump trucks.
I am not here of my own accord.
I am doing a story on a man who is lucky to be alive.
He lost control on the windy cold hill and flipped his car into a ditch.
A frozen, snow covered ditch.
Poor bastard, I think as I get out, feeling the wind slap me in the face like an punch drunk college buddy.
The driver must have suffered. He must have been so cold.
This guy was upside down in a frigid crumpled car clinging to life.
He was bleeding and hurt. His car was so mangled, so flattened, so hidden by brush and bark, that he was not found for hours.
The cold didn’t kill him. Maybe it preserved him like a frozen hot dog.
Maybe the cold preserved him like a hunk of beef in a refrigerator.
Maybe he was so cold he drifted off to that dream place between life and death and just held on till help could arrive.
I am standing at this accident scene looking for clues that are not readily apparent.
I wish they were.
The longer I take searching for clues, the longer the wind has its way with me, infiltrating my private places.
After a few minutes of getting bitch slapped by old man winter, I start thinking that poor bastard is me.
Maybe I am the guy in the frozen incubator just clinging to consciousness.
I start off with no hat, no hood, no gloves.
I’m not sure what I was thinking.
I know I hate cold.
I know that cold hates me.
I always think I’m braver and tougher than I am.
I am really a woosy.
I am dumb and cold like the guy spinning off the road, slamming into the tree.
Within 5 minutes, I am feeling the raw burn of the elements.
My toes are screaming like little school girls.
My fingers are crying like they’ve been visited by the business end of a Nun’s ruler.
The problem?
I’m weak.
But I also have a life time of frost bite issues that quickly get my attention.
The cold slaps me upside my head like an angry gang-banger.
“Why you outside without gloves, Punk.”
I don’t have an answer.
I am the guy who lost control in the curve and flipped his car.
I am frozen meat in a locker, trapped between the light and the dark waiting for help.
I find car parts, stuck in the dirt, embedded in the tree.
“Yeah he was upside there for hours” a resident who doesn’t want to go on camera tells me.
“Did he live?”
My teeth chatter.
“yeah. Poor son of a bitch made it. Somehow.
The man smiles and quickly closes the door.
Another blast of wind rushes down my collar.
It is a cheese grater on my skin.
“What else?” my camera man says, his words floating to me on a frozen breath.
“I can’t take any more. We’re done. Is your car running.”
“You know it is.”
“Poor bastard,” I say staring at the chunk of bark torn out of the tree where the car hit.
“If the crash didn’t kill him, the cold should have.”
Life’s Crazy™