I’ve long repeated the quote, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco,” attributing the words to that great American author, Mark Twain. Google, however, is a great tool for debunking long-cherished delusions, as I found out when I double-checked before writing this column.
Turns out I’ve been misquoting my hero all along. The source is unknown, despite its perfect Twainian lyricism. And since I’ve never spent a summer in San Francisco, or a winter for that matter, who am I to be misquoting him anyway?
Maybe I like the quote because my dad used to say something similar. I was a year round team sports kid growing up in Southern California, and we occasionally had to deal with weather. Dad loved to say that the start of baseball was always the coldest season, and the start of football the hottest. Since those first football scrimmages were in heat approaching triple digits, it was actually something to be concerned about.
But baseball season? A spring evening dropping down to the mid-sixties is cold only if you live in a place where a nylon windbreaker is considered a winter coat.
I sometimes forget that springtime in the Northern Rockies is something to be reckoned with. Winter is too intimidating to ignore, but I can let my guard down come spring. I see the sun and feel a bit of warmth and assume I’ll be fine wearing shorts and sandals (over socks of course). Then it starts snowing and I look like a dope.
I left my winter survival kit in the garage the other day. We were tempted out of the house by a bit of sunshine and the promise that the warmer weather had lured large rainbows at a nearby lake into the shallows where we might reach them with our fly rods. The trout were there, but so was the weather. The wind whipped up when we arrived and pelted our faces with wet snow.
If I hadn’t forgotten the kit we would have been able to pull on an extra layer of clothing. My collection of “vintage” fleece may be ratty and pilled up, but the coats still keep you warm. We also would have been able to dip into my extensive cache of chemical hand warmers — you know, the type that when you squeeze them they warm to barely a degree above the ambient air temperature, and then hours later you find them undergoing a thermal nuclear reaction in the pocket of the wet jeans you peeled off in the laundry room.
Early in my career as an outdoor writer, when I was still down south, I was invited to view the release of a small herd of pronghorn captured in Utah onto a ranch not too far north of Los Angeles. Though is was winter, at that latitude it was still a surprise that a storm had dropped a couple of inches of snow at the release site, I was roundly mocked by the assembled journalists for my poor choice of footwear: a pair of brown leather topsiders. I’d never had reason before that day to think that any enclosed-toe footwear wasn’t proper winter shoe attire.
I bought my first pair of pack boots shortly thereafter. Call me shallow, but I like to fit in.
This can be an awkward time of year to play outdoors. Other than spring turkey, hunting is shut down. Fishing, however, can be dynamite. The rivers may be hit or miss, depending on runoff, but trout fishing on lakes is often the best of the year.
Sometimes you even have the outdoors to yourself. My daughter and a friend took a bike ride in Glacier the other day, up the Going-to-the-Sun Road, to The Loop.
Was it cold? Maybe, but they found solitude in pre-tourist season in Glacier. And that’s one of the blessings of spring.