“You think it’s cold?” asked Jake, tipping his head slightly to one side with a kind of questioning look on his face.
“Well, let me tell you. This ain’t cold. Why back in the 40s, then it was cold! The temperature went so low we had to bring the thermometer in and thaw it out so we could see how cold it was!
“Why we’d start to the barn with a pail of water and by the time we go there it would be frozen solid! We had to have it boiling in the pail in order to make it to the barn so the cows could drink it before it froze again!”

I raised one eyebrow a hair, as Jake sipped his coffee, the ice starting to drip from his moustache as it thawed.
“Cold, you say? Gramps went to milk old Bessie and all he got was vanilla ice cream in the pail. We brought it in and put it in the freezer for dessert. When the wind was blowing, if you didn’t cover your eyes and keep blinking, why your eyes would freeze…just like that and you would have to go in to thaw them out so you could blink again.”
“You must have had trouble starting the cars,” I offered.
“Start? We never stopped them. Just kept them going day and night. If they stalled, they’d freeze right up, gas and all and that would be it!
“The farmer up the road used to heat up his gas on the stove, then take it out, pour it in the carburetor and the gas tank to get his truck started. That was after he ran a kerosene heater under the engine for about two hours to warm the engine.”
“Must have been tough keeping warm,” I said.
“You got that right,” continued Jake. “Hell, we wore three layers of clothes all winter, from about November to March. January was the worst though. If it got above zero, it felt like a balmy day. People would take their coats off and go around in shirt sleeves, it felt so warm. They’d be out sunbathing if it got into the teens.
“That old wood-fired kitchen stove, remember that? That never stopped going, nor did the one in the main room at Gramp’s house. They were always stoked to the brim.
“We used to go through 10 cords of wood in an average winter, and that was good hardwoods that give off plenty of them BTUs too! Global warming, my foot! We could have used some of that back then!”
“What about the wild animals? How did they survive?”
“Why you could go out and find them frozen solid, just waiting for you. Go out and pick up some frozen rabbit, maybe a deer, a pheasant or two. Bring them in and cook them up, just like you pulled them out of a freezer.”
“And the fish?”
“Frozen solid. Just walk across the ice at Waterman’s until you spotted the right kind and size of fish you wanted through the ice. Cut out the block they were in, throw them on the sled and drag them home.
“Sometimes fishermen ran their Colemans right on the lake with a big kettle on them and they would throw the block right in, thaw out the fish, then throw them in a sack so they would be easier to carry. That’s if they were taking home a whole bunch, of course, and had mouths to feed. I guess some probably threw them in the freezer for later too though.”

“I read in Keach’s Burrillville As It Was and As It Is, written in 1856, that it was cold back then, too,” I noted.
“He explained that the Northwest Corner was colder than Providence usually, adding that ‘We have more snow, partly the result of our altitude and it may be partially occasioned by the larger amount of forest’ At one point, he said, the snow and wind were so bad they just gave up trying to keep roads and paths opened and traveled over the crust of the frozen snow to go anywhere.”
“It could get that way,” agreed Jake.
“It was pretty cold last week,” I suggested.
“Yep,” agreed Jake. “Kind of reminded me of those days back then, but, of course, it was nowhere near as cold as it used to get back when I was younger, like I say.”
“Kind of like the Blizzard of ’78, I imagine. Just one of those times when all the rules of nature are broken and things get so exaggerated they are almost beyond belief?” I asked.
“Exactly,” Jake agreed, finishing his coffee and getting up to go. “There are some things that are just unbelievable.”
The above is an excerpt from the book Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sanity… by Dick Martin, a Glocester resident, former Burrillville High School teacher and contributor for NRI NOW.
Martin can be contacted at [email protected].