Winter Comes to Minnesota, One Hopes

echopress.com

Wherever you go in the world, if people ask you where you’re from and you say Minnesota, they say, “It gets cold there, doesn’t it.” When New Yorkers travel to Minneapolis, we don’t say, “That’s a really big city, isn’t it.” That would be dumb. But somehow we haven’t created a brand personality for ourselves other than weather. We wanted to be an arts mecca and a tech center and we had our chances but didn’t make it. What we’re left with is our status as America’s Number One producer of turkeys, which doesn’t have the same allure.

With global warming, Minnesota’s status as the Boy It Gets Cold There State is not even accurate, and what’s worse, it’s taken away we Minnesota males’ chance to demonstrate competence. After fourteen inches of snow, you go out the door and hear tires screaming and smell burning rubber and see Nadine the neighbor lady at the wheel of her Buick stuck in a snowbank and you walk over and tap on her window. She opens it. She looks crazed, in a rage, foaming at the mouth, and you say, calmly, “Let me help you.” And she gets out and you get in and you rock the car gently back and forth, and expertly rock it over the hump and out of the snowbank. She offers you money. You say, “No no no no. My pleasure.” You walk away.

You are a sensitive caring well-read progressive male with an interest in the arts but with no handyman skills whatsoever. This heroic rescue is the testosterone highlight of your year, the urban equivalent of rescuing a child from a grizzly. You also have a pair of jumper cables in your trunk so you can start a car with a dead battery, but a balmy winter such as those we’ve been having denies you these manly opportunities. Your only remaining guy skills are reaching things on high shelves or using a plunger to open a clogged toilet. Not nearly so impressive.

But there’s always the chance you could get lucky. Nadine could call you one evening and say, “The furnace is out and I can’t get a repairman and my husband is having a self-loathing episode.” So you go next door. You smell gas fumes and hear children weeping and go down to the basement and see tools scattered in the furnace room, screwdrivers, wrenches, a sledgehammer, a revolver, and you hear him, he’s in the laundry room on the phone with his therapist, saying, “I am utterly inadequate. My life is a total failure. I need to be put into some sort of institution.”

You check the shutoff switch and clear the intake vent and relight the pilot and the furnace roars to life and you go in and comfort the husband. “This is a very weird old furnace manufactured in Slovakia, the Hromkoviç, and I was an exchange student in Slovakia twenty years ago and lived with a family who owned one. You’re a good person. Go take a pill and do some deep breathing.” He knows it’s a lie but he appreciates it.

You turn down her thanks, and the next day you thaw out another neighbor’s frozen pipes with a hair dryer — and that night you find an unconscious woman in a snowbank and warm her with your own body as you learned in Scouts, but these things are possible only when it’s 30 below, not in the autumnal winters we’ve been having. Face it, guys, the days of home repair are almost over. Electronics can’t be fixed by ordinary men. Parenting demands sainthood, but appliances are a mystery. Our manhood is threatened.

And that’s why some of us are going hunting for terrorist turkeys that’ve been reported in the suburbs. Rogue turkeys from turkey ranches who observed the fall Thanksgiving roundup and flew the coop and went on the attack in supermarket parking lots. Shoppers looking for their cars in the dark and suddenly there’s a shriek and flapping of wings and a giant bird tries to peck a hole in your chest. They can peck the lock on your door and hide in the back seat and come after you as you’re driving home and you swerve into oncoming traffic. Suicide turkeys. We patrol parking lots with a baseball bat in hand, listening for gobbles, and we don’t do it for money. It’s our duty as men. Enjoy your holidays.

Garrison Keillor © 10.20.25