HOW COLD WAS IT? IT WAS SO COLD THAT...

By Juan Montoya
The recent ice storm we just endured last night brought back some memories.
It was the Fall of 1976 and I had just transferred from Texas Southmost College to the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.
(The UM had accepted 41 out of 43 TSC hours and I had placed out of Spanish.)
When I arrived at the end of August, the scenery was overwhelming. Not only is Ann Arbor a city graced with classic and modernistic structures, it was also one of the first "green" municipalities in the country. I am not lying when I say that virtually every tree in the city had been catalogued and one had to ask permission from the city forester to touch one of them.
In the late fall, the palette of greens, yellows, oranges and reds were breathtaking as one walked through the campus to classes. Coming as I was, from a land of one perpetual season, the changes seemed dramatic.
It was nice while Fall lasted. But going into winter, I began to experience a certain discomfort as did my fellow Hispanics from New Mexico, California and Texas. Each succeeding week, it just seemed to get colder and colder. It got to the point where it was unbearable to be outside unless you really had to.
What we didn't know was that we were about to be submerged into a season of indescribable cold because that year, in early 1977, the Midwest was hit with the Blizzard of 1976-77.
Historians now tell us that the winter of 1976-77 was one of the harshest on record over much of the Great Lakes and eastern United States. It had started early with record cold and snows in November which continued through December and January.

January 1977 was particularly brutal, with no thaw for the first time in recorded history in Southern Ontario. The persistent cold and frequent snowfalls allowed a record snow pack to form, especially over Lake Erie which had frozen solid by the end of December.

However, in Michigan, the first blizzard blast lasted for almost an entire week. For us southern folk, it was a bone-marrow numbing cold. We literally had to walk from building to building to reach our classes and not venture into the frigid wind tunnels that the streets had become. The sun never shone during all that time. The horizontal wind just blew across the land and created whiteouts with the snow and ice.

I had noticed that I was developing hives all over my body and I ventured out of my Alice Lloyd dorm to visit student health services to see what was happening to me. One of the doctors at the UM Hospital asked where I was from and I told him South Texas.

He then took some skin samples from my arms and told me to come back later that afternoon. I did.

When I returned he told me that he had found the remains of tropical microbes invisible to the naked eye that lived naturally in the warm climate of the south among us and when they began to feel the frigid temperatures, had burrowed into the pores of my skin causing the hives when their organisms decayed. 

I was floored. He gave me some antibiotic lotion and in a few days, then hives were gone.

But if I thought that my the cold was over after the week-long blizzard, I was in for a nasty surprise. The cold persisted through day and night that winter. We actually went through a six-week stretch where the temperature never went above freezing, even during the day.

I remember one clear day as I was walking to class and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. The sky was the brightest hue of blue. Whatever ice or snow lay on the ground or on building was frozen solid.

By then I had acquired thermal long johns, a down jacket, a woolen scarf, gloves, and a wool cap. AS I walked down the sidewalk, I noticed through the slit between my cap and my scarf what appeared to be sprinkles of glitter falling in front of me as I walked. I turned and glanced around me and I cold see no snow or ice on the tree limbs (now bare) that lined the walk. There were no buildings nearby from where the ice bits could have been blown by the wind.

I was mystified and stopped to look around when I noticed that every time I breathed out the glitter fluttered in the sunlight to the ground in front of me before I realized it.

It was the vapor from my breath that was freezing instantly and the ice particles were the "glitter" that I had seen falling to ground in front of me.