the first day of winter

It seems unbelieveable because I've spent the last six weeks shivering, but today was the first day of winter.  This was the morning's weather report: -4°F Feels Like -30 °F."

It was a strange night for me. I chatted with the Bavarian between 2 and 4 a.m., and then fell asleep and had this dream, which I recalled to Harry by email:

After we got off the phone last night, I fell asleep and had a very vivid dream about coming to your flat to see you. We were ecstatic to see each other. You showed me around your house. You had gauzy shades drawn across your windows so that the light looked muted. You were in the kitchen; covering the kitchen floor was loose dog food and a box of cat litter. You said you didn't own a cat, but that you just kept the floor covered like this. There was a soggy mattress under your kitchen sink that you used to catch water falling from the pipes. I went to use the bathroom and accidentally peed in your bidet, because I'm American. And then I found the toilet proper, and noticed that you used all American ("Desert Essence") toiletries. I knocked over a box of cinnamon-flavored toothpicks by accident and then had to sweep up the mess I made. But the bathroom floor was covered in grains, nuts, and seeds, like a birdhouse, so it took a very long time to clean; I had to sweep around the grains, nuts, and seeds. When I came out of the bathroom, you directed me to a hidden room, a huge ballroom, where there was a convention of students of foreign languages and I was forced to sit at a table with very irritating girls learning French and then required to write the word "Nitzan" in Hebrew. I left the convention and found your flat through a series of corridors, and you in the bedroom. I just wanted to speak with you, but you said you had a room to clean first. You opened a door in your bedroom to an adjoining room that was enclosed but had no roof. The sides of it were covered in what looked like dried strawberry marmalade. You started scraping the marmalade off the walls with an ice scraper and I noticed that there were dead rodents stuck to the walls as well. They were bats, and the marmalade was actually dried blood and fruit. You said, "Many Europeans would consider having bats very lucrative." You had trapped a bat the size of a cat in a tube-shaped cage, but it looked like a white ferret. You had also trapped five baby bat/ferrets in a smaller cage, and you chased me around with it and I told you I was going to cry unless you stopped. You stopped, and then we went back in your bedroom, and we took off our clothes, and you told me you hated the polizei.

I woke up with a bloody nose and saw that there were gobs of snot/blood all around the collar of my hoodie. Then I decided it was time to leave. The thermometer outside read:

I wanted to go outside because (1) it was sunny, and sunny and freezing is better than indoors and freezing, and (2) I don't know how many opportunities I'll have in my life to experience what -30 °F feels like, so why not seize the opportunity? 

When I was preparing to move to Chicago, I was very concerned with the abstract idea of Chicago Cold. It was abstract because people I spoke to about the weather spoke in indeterminate and relative phrases, like, "It's so fucking cold." What does that mean? I mean, I've lived in Boston and New York and spent several months in northern Vermont. None of those places are particularly warm. So I figured people who talked about Chicago cold were just pussies or tall tale tellers. 

Not so. Chicago is so fucking cold. How cold is Chicago relative to New York or Boston? New York does not get colder than 20°F except on rare occasions, when people cry and hide indoors. When I bought my little blue Jamis, I told myself I would bike commute every weekday that the air temperature was over 20°F at 8 a.m. and the atmosphere was free of precipitation. I haven't ridden my bike a day since November 20, because my unambitious criteria have not been met, even once. 20°F is a whole helluva lot colder than 38°F, which is average winter daytime temperature in New York. Say eighteen degrees is the difference between seasons. Summer at 74, spring and fall at 56, winter at 38; then a Chicago winter is the fifth season: post-winter, Satan-chewing-on-your-head HELL. In hell, one must wear silk longjohns at all times.

So today I got a taste of  -30°F. And how cold is -30°F? Turns out -30°F is not too much colder than zero! Getting stabbed in the face still feels like getting stabbed in the face. Above a certain size of blade, it's all the same pain. I think this is why it's so hard to describe really cold weather.  -30°F feels like eating raw onions, or watching slow-motion footage of the Tacoma-Narrows bridge collapse. When the wind gusted hard by the lake today, a feeling of melancholy overwhelmed me, and I thought about my family. But later I felt triumphant, euphoric, and panicked, so I'm not sure that real-feel temperature is in any way correlated with emotions.  -30°F sounds like the English horn solo from the New World Symphony, maybe because it's fucking lonesome out in the world when it's that cold, and you feel like a pioneer. The guy in "To Build A Fire" dies at -50°F with amber icicles of chewing tobacky spittle coming down his beard. 

I wanted to know how one dresses for -30°F. This is what I wore:

Top to bottom: 

1. neoprene balaclava (ski mask)
2. sleeveless spandex thermal shirt
3. silk long-sleeved thermal shirt
4. thick wool turtleneck sweater
5. down ski jacket with hood pulled up
6. regular old undies
7. silk long johns
8. yoga pants
9. regular old jeans
10. padded wool ski socks pulled up to knees
11. wool hiking socks bunched at ankles
12. hiking boots
13. lobster (split-finger) mittens

I was toasty warm except for (1) my ass, which I should've covered with something windproof, because it was red for a few hours after I got in from the cold, and (2) the space around my eyes that the balaclava didn't cover. I put on two layers of sunscreen, hoping the chemicals would provide some protection from the wind, but it didn't help. I was worried my contacts were going to freeze. At points I had to pull the hood entirely over my face and just walk blind for a bit. 

I started walking at 12:50 p.m. and finished at 5:15.  In between, I walked about seven miles.

Steam rising off the Chicago River at Goose Island. The grain elevator you see in the background is actually the salt lift for the Morton Salt Factory. I started off my walking tour with a stroll through Chicago's industrial corridor near the Cabrini-Green projects. 

I spent a bit of time on this bridge kicking snow blocks into the river and watching them float away. Over the course of the day, I stopped in a outdoors store and a bagel store and a music store and a bakery, to warm my frostbitten ass up. 

 
Lincoln Park near the lakefront. I saw one other person in the entire park, a crazy jogger shuffling down an unplowed path. There was no one at all on the Lakefront Path, a bit of a contrast from the summertime crowds.

The beach area was all fenced off but not with any gusto, and it was easy to slip by. I walked along what I thought was a sandbar, but it turned out to be a pier.

Then I looked down and realized I had walked to the edge of the pier, and what I thought was beach to the sides of the path was in fact the shallows, frozen over. The ice transitioned abruptly back into water.

That black dot on the left part of the screen is a crazy duck bobbing for apples. Off to my right, I could see that I had walked out to the posts that demarcate the end of the swimming area. Big mesas of ice had formed around them, but I couldn't figure out why they would be pushed out of the water like that. They looked like slices of cake.

More cake slices to the left. It also kind of looked like waves had been frozen in midair.

The snow was deep on the path. The coldest part of my day occurred on the pedestrian bridge over Lakeshore Drive, where nothing was protecting me from the wind blowing straight off the lake. I walked backward so that the air wouldn't fill up the space around my hood and blow down my jacket.

Two hundred feet from the shore, I tripped over this plaque in the middle of a snow field.

And then I continued toward home along Armitage Street. 

Chicago has not done a very good job of plowing this year because the snows have been cold and plentiful and the city budget did not account for such an early winter. All day long I watched people scraping and digging out their cars. It seemed like torture. They all did this last week too, when it snowed, and they'll do it again on Tuesday when it's supposed to snow another 6". Why do people have cars here?

I walked back across Goose Island and down Paulina Street to get to my gym. At the Ark Thrift Shop, I saw a beautiful old friend in the window:

I had completely forgotten about it, but this stuffed dog played a very prominent role in my childhood. I owned one just like it. It was extra light and huge. I straddled it and held it by the ears and galloped around my living room in Milpitas, California. I never named it but I pretended it was my dog, before my family adopted Coach. Just then I closed my eyes and prayed for my Mannequin moment, but the stuffed dog in the window did not miraculously come to life and tell he was indeed owned by a Chinese girl in California in the early 1980s. Nonetheless I felt happier having seen the dog. 

I went to the gym and spent fifteen minutes stripping wet layer after wet layer off my bright red ass, and I ellipticalled for six miles while watching a dog long jump contest on ESPN 2.  I ate an organic apple and walked the quarter mile home.

I found that my Naglene bottle had turned into a solid block of ice. I put on my United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois lounging robe, heated water for chai and ate some ginger snaps while scrolling through the days non-news. I called OZ, who was on his way to lose money to NG in poker, and then I called SL, and we talked through some down moments and about Chen Shui-Bian's physician's son and ferrets and Love Actually. SL said she was appalled by the power relationships in the movie's romances but I could tell from her inflection that she was actually intrigued by the gender normativity, or maybe I'm just projecting. I ate a dinner of rice and tofu, and then I edited my cousin's MPH application essays, using the word "cacophonous" where a smaller, better word would do. Now I am going to take a bath and read my popular history book about cadavers. It has not been a bad Sunday.