By Charlie Warner
Argus News Editor
I came to a realization over the weekend. I must be getting old...well older. When I was a youngster, I used to love winter. When the first big snowstorm hit, I'd bounce out of bed, peer out the window at the snow-shrouded landscape and get this warm, fuzzy feeling. All through my grade school, high school, and college years, you couldn't keep me out of the snow.

When I was real young, it was building forts and tunnels in the snow, walking the six blocks to Lake Addie and skating or sliding all day. When I turned 15, we got a snowmobile. For the next five years, you couldn't keep me off that machine. I drove it before school, after school, every Saturday, Sunday, snowdays, holidays, I even drove it my sleep! Three decades ago, before the major climate change, the snowmobile season started several weeks before Thanksgiving and lasted until April.

I got my first pair of skis my sophomore of college. I turned into a ski bum. I couldn't get enough of skiing. I down-hill skied, cross country skied. I even tied the water skiing rope behind the family snowmobile and had my sister pull me all over the countryside at breakneck speed on my downhill skis.

I took an Outward Bound winter survival course my senior year of college. The final test was being dumped in the middle of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area 50 miles from the Bald Eagle Nature Center near Ely with an arctic sleeping bag, matches, skies, snowshoes, a map, compass, and just enough food to survive. The four other members of my group and I had three days to find out way back to the nature center. If we weren't back by noon of the third day, a search party would be sent out for us, and we would fail the class.

It was a wonderful experience. We slept out on a frozen lake one clear night, with 30 below temps, watching the norther lights and listening to timber wolves howling all night. We made it back to camp in time and I received two credits towards my bachelor's degree. I also fell in love with winter camping, crossing country skiing, and snow-shoeing, and spent many nights during the decade sleeping in the snow. I nearly moved to the Bayfield, Wis. area so I would have more winter to enjoy. Back then, I couldn't understand why anyone would want to go south for the winter. Winter was beautiful, it was exhilarating, and challenging.

I don't know if it was the decade I spent in the building trades, freezing nearly every part of my body framing up houses and commercial buildings, but sometime around the time I hit 40, my love for the cold, the ice, the snow, started to wane.

It might also have something to do with the fact that I have become a golf-oholic and walking down a green fairway on a warm, sunny day seemed much more enjoyable to me then digging a hole in the side of a snowdrift to spend the night.

While the warming trend that has shortened up our winters in the Midwest by at least six weeks concerns me, as far as long-term consequences, I must admit it has been nice golfing well into December, and even getting in a few rounds in January in recent winters. And during the past eight years I have been commuting at least 50 miles round trip each day to work, the mellow winters have made that aspect of my life much more tolerable.

I think it hit me that I really didn't like winter Sunday morning as I was attempting to remove a four-inch combination of ice and snow that was as hard as concrete from my sidewalk, patio, and driveway. It seems as if I have been rediscovering this new sentiment when the first big snow event of the season occurs for some time now. Instead of dreams of skiing, skating, building forts, and snowmobiles dancing in my head, I have thoughts of back-breaking shoveling, sub-zero windchills stinging my face, and frigid vehicles breaking down.

"Why do people want to live in this?" I asked myself, as my arms began to ache after chopping ice for more than three hours. Those "snow birds," I used to laugh at, seem to be the wise ones. Winter may be beautiful if you don't have to work in it, but the older I get, the more wisdom I seem to find in the migratory birds of all colors, shapes, and sizes that head south every winter.

I know Caledonia's Winter Wonderland celebration is upon us. I'm happy for the organizers of the event that it will look like a Minnesota winter for Winter Wonderland. The folks who thrill at standing out in the cold during Friday night's parade will have snow and cold to enjoy. I too will be there with camera in hand, partaking in the festivities and covering the events for the newspaper. But deep down inside I will be dreaming of green grass, that 250-yard drive straight down the middle of the fairway, and my first par of the season!

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