THE CAPRICIOUSNESS OF MARCH
This week, I’m ruminating about a seldom discussed topic, the weather.
Yea! The month of March has ended! Many places claim to experience four seasons in a day. It’s a boast about the unpredictableness of their weather; as if it’s a good thing for people to live in a locale where moon boots, galoshes, sneakers, and sandals are worn on a daily basis. Of course, most of those 4-in-1 season days occurs in the month of March; that two-faced month incorporating the similes of a lion and a lamb representing the stormy transition from winter to spring. March isn’t even human, unlike January which is represented by the god Janus and his two opposing faces. Janus looks like a bookend ready to be split in two. Hang on a sec, I meant to be talking about the capriciousness of March and not January – about face.
As mentioned ad nauseam in my previous Daily Tidbits and Weekly Ruminations, I used to live in Fairbanks, Alaska. Watching the local news was a treat, mainly because news revolved around non-human events and issues; in particular, canines and the weather. There were the usual stories about drugs, crime, military base hi jinks, and happenings at the local university, but the the best bit of local news was the weather, sports and occasional rescues of people who had driven onto, and sometimes into, rivers; been buried in a snowstorm; fallen off of something terribly high; or fallen off a snowmachine (don’t you dare call it a snowmobile). Usually all these things happened to the same tourist trying to experience the “real Alaska.”
Russia was in the news on a daily basis in the Golden Heart City. Siberia in particular, since Siberia is closer to Fairbanks than Seattle. Besides, most of the weather fronts cross the Bering Sea from Siberia, and watching the animated wind and pressure zones was fascinating to an Outsider from the lower-48, like me.
The other fun bit was to view the temperature records for that particular day, and the temperatures during the 1930’s were extreme. For instance, the record low for March 27, was set in 1938 at -34F (-37C). The next day, the record high for March 28 was set in 1939 at +55F (+13C). That’s an 89 degree (F) temperature change! So, when planning what to wear in late March 1939, one would assume, based on what was worn the year before, that a heavy-duty winter coat and mukluks would be required. The mantra, “Cotton kills” would be exclaimed to anyone who would listen and dog sleds would be the most efficient form of transport. But alas, one would be wrong, since 55-degree weather in Fairbanks, in March, is akin to a tropical heatwave, so walking barefoot in potentially fatal cotton tops and less-lethal linen shorts would be the ticket instead.
Now that I’m back in Utah, I try not to complain about the weather, but it’s just so darn hard not to do so. It’s so much milder here in the intermountain west, it’s hardly worth talking about. Dressing in layers and wearing sensible shoes takes care of most temperature variations during this windy beast of a month. Or so I thought. Turns out, the temperature records for the month of March in Helper, Utah are a low of -27F (-33C) on March 2, 1917 and a high of +92F (+33C) on March 10, 1900. Wow, that’s a 119 degree temperature difference! Of course that difference had a 17 year time split instead of one year and a range of just over one week instead of one day. However, even the lowest and highest temperature variation for the month of March in Fairbanks was a measly 105 degrees from -49F (-45C) on March 1, 1956 to +56F (+13C) on March 31, 1994.
I don’t know why I’m so pleased that Helper, Utah has more “extreme” weather than Fairbanks, Alaska. I guess it’s nice that Utah’s Christmas Town excels at something, even if that something occurred 100 years ago and is based on caprice.
~ Emery Lamb
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