WuzthataWintererWudnit?

By Norm Wheeler
Sun editor
“Light snow is falling in Ely, Minnesota today, May 20, 2007,” says DJ Ray Nargis. (Remember Ray Nargis? He used to live on Echo Valley Road, teach at The Leelanau School, and recite poetry at the Beach Bards Bonfire on summer Friday nights. Stream his Sunday morning (10 a.m.-1 p.m. EST) radio show on WELY.com End of the Road Radio — kind of a cross between Northern Exposure and the Stone Circle. Great stuff!)

Snow in late May in the upper Midwest? What’s going on? Is it ironic evidence of global warming? What about the fickle winter we just escaped here in Leelanau County? Ask a local and the recent surprise, dismay and chuckles flow right out of their short-term memories. A warm Thanksgiving (record high 54 degrees on Nov. 24) was followed in December by a week of heavy snow. Then the roller coaster climbed into a week of 40s with rain, and that good base was all gone. Here we go again, everyone sighed, another winter that can’t make up its mind. Another record high of 50 degrees followed on the Winter Solstice! Ugh, a brown Christmas!! Then a record 48-degree New Year’s Day, (the only predictable part of that day was Michigan’s loss to USC in the Rose Bowl!), and it stayed 48 all week! Chris Skellenger played golf at The Dunes on Jan. 4, and he had to call for a tee time!
Finally snow returned by mid month, the lifts were cranked up on Prospect Hill at The Homestead, and a semblance of normalcy returned. By early February the deep cold dug in, ice mounds formed 50 yards out from the beach on Sleeping Bear Bay, and that same lone coyote loped from somewhere below Alligator Hill past the Observatory to the mouth of the Crystal River along that ice shortcut as it does once every year. February 26 was everybody’s Snow Day after a heavy foot fell. The lion of March roared 50 mph winds (see Rob Karner’s photo) and then bit down with brutal cold. Skellenger left 90-degree Belize on Feb. 4. When he got off the plane in Traverse City it was zero, and nobody felt sorry for him.
But it was 55 degrees by the March 21 vernal equinox, and the thermometer gasped with “the bends” from coming up too fast. It hit the 70s a few days later, and no one could have guessed how April would make us pay for that apparently early spring! (Thanks to Andy McFarlane’s Leelanau Almanac @ Leelanau.com for weather details!)
“The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.”
(Robert Frost, from Two Tramps in Mud Time)
On April 1, Louan Lechler drove past a church marquee on Cherry Bend Road that said “The Rest of the Christmas Story” and then it began to snow! The April Fool dumped two snowstorms, one just before Easter and one just after. The Leelanau Enterprise reported that it was the first April since 1966 to deliver over 15 inches of snow.
On April 5 I drove up from Chicago, returning from Spring Break in warm places like so many others. There was a dusting at the Indiana border, several inches in Holland, and by the time the freeway turned into a two-lane it was a grim almost foot of snow. The saddest creatures were the robins, hunched forlorn and scowling along the thawed shoulders of the roads like Republican congresspersons after the last election, or more accurately (since the robins had done nothing wrong) like Bears fans at the Superbowl. The poor birds would fly up in front of the passing cars, apparently committing suicide. Sue Skellenger of North Coast Nursery shoveled off the grass, then collected and chopped worms to save the robins!
Joe Spaulding had closed down his rental house on Bow Road during the March hot spell and headed off for spring break. He didn’t bother to drain the pipes. It took him several days to fix all the leaks in April. Tim Barr reports that April was the worst business-wise ever for Arts Tavern. “Bad weather and bad attitudes,” he recalls. “Those who usually don’t go south suddenly went!”
Now the fruit trees are in full bloom, the trilliums nod in the new-green woods, the grass grows to alarming heights as your mower that won’t start sits in the repair shop, and May is just the way it’s supposed to be. The summer cars return, the businesses sweep off and air out, and we all stretch toward summer, ready to forget the slings and arrows of outrageous winter fortune we just survived. It’s time for the Pickin’ Party. Who’s gonna be in the Fourth of July parade?