For those of us who spend our winters here in the North Country, there are few things more entertaining than listening to the howls of astonishment whenever the East Coast gets a wee taste of the kind of bracing conditions we take for granted.

You might have thought the world was coming to an end to hear the Eastern media types hype the latest wintery blast from the North.

Schools closed in Baltimore, and thousands of workers across the East Coast stayed home from work to avoid risking exposure to the brutal conditions. Forecasters warned everyone to stay inside, lest they freeze to death in mere minutes. New York City and Philadelphia both set a new record one morning, when the thermometer dipped to… don’t faint… eight degrees above zero. Further to the north, Burlington, Vermonters suffered through an overnight low of minus-15. The windchill, however, was reported to hit minus-30.

How do they survive?

Of course if you took the temperature thousands of feet in the air, such at the summit of 6,288-foot Mount Washington, you could actually find a temperature, at minus-36, that would prompt some of us North Country denizens to put a decent hat on. The temperature on the New Hampshire mountaintop made national headlines in the East. Yet buried within a New York Times story on the mountaintop’s chilly temperature, was a single sentence that mentioned that the towns of Embarrass and Cotton, Minnesota, where people actually live and go about their daily lives, had recorded minus-39 that same morning. But that was actually a warmup from previous mornings, when the temperature dipped to 45 below in Embarrass.

Far from an inconvenience, our typical winter deep freeze prompts many of us to head outside. For me, it’s the best time to strap on my snowshoes and head out into the Lost Lake Swamp for a good tromp in the bush.

Of course, whenever I think I’m being a bit too smug about what passes for winter in these parts, I check out the weather report from Yakutsk. It’s a city of 250,000 hardy Russians located in northeastern Siberia. Their high temperatures for the next five days include minus-44, minus-44, minus-42, minus-38 and minus-37. And that’s not a cold snap… those are routine temperatures there in January. They don’t just warm their cars up before heading out. Many Yakutians, particularly truckers, leave their vehicles running all winter.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years it’s that cold is relative, so I understand why temperatures we take for granted can seem so jarring to folks out East.

I still remember that morning it hit minus-60 in Tower. I was at the official thermometer that morning, but had to leave early because it was newspaper distribution day and our regular driver couldn’t get his truck started. By the time I had returned from picking up the papers, the temperature had warmed considerably, to about minus-45. I remember thinking “You know, forty-five below doesn’t feel too bad.” It’s a dry cold, of course.