About The North Country
Adjusting to the North Country
There’s no bad weather, only bad clothes.
-- Scandanavian Proverb
For many of us from warmer, drier, more populated areas, adjusting to every day life in the North Country: the weather, the shopping, the familiarity, can be as challenging as our work. It is a real adjustment. But it’s not an impossible adjustment, nor is it entirely negative. The North Country, winter and all, can be a very pleasant place to live. This chapter is included to give a few hints from those of us who’ve adjusted enough to admit we live here to those of you asking in wonder “how do people LIVE like this?”
I. “These people drive their TRUCKS onto the ice!!”
If you’ve just finished your Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota, you’re ahead of the game so skip this section. If you’re from somewhere south of the Adirondacks, you may find yourself re-defining “cold.” Most of us have our story of discovering deep cold … finding out that our tire valves tend to fail at –35°F so winter is tire-changing season, that an exposed nose can freeze to numbness in a walk half-way across the parking lot, that by mid-February 0°F sounds like a relief, and 0°C sounds downright balmy, and that hat-hair really doesn’t look that bad. Though you’ll have your own personal encounters with winter, there are a few simple things that can help immensely:
- Invest in good boots -- Canadian Sorels are the boot of choice for the really cold days, but other good boots are available … some local stores (Wear on Earth in Potsdam, Hackett’s in Canton) carry them as do the outdoor catalogs such as L.L Bean and REI. These boots tend to be too warm to wear inside, so bring extra shoes to work and get used to walking around other people’s homes in your socks.
- Invest in a good parka (good to –25°F), gloves or mittens, scarf, and a hat that covers your ears that you’ll actually wear. This could be an excuse for your first shopping trip to Burlington or Ottawa!
- Obtain two or three cans of lock de-icer (available at some drug stores and some gas stations) to keep at home, in your office, and in your work bag.
- Get a couple good ice-scrapers and snow brushes. Credit cards may be OK with light frost, but they’re useless on real ice!
Fall can be a beautiful season filled with dry, sunny days and colorful foliage, yet some pointers are also appropriate …
- Buy and actually attach those anti-deer whistles to your car, slow down at dusk, and watch the side of the road for large animals contemplating suicide.
- Don’t go into the woods during hunting season and paint your pets international orange.
- Lock your car doors in faculty parking lot or someone will put a grocery bag of zucchini in it!
Those will help you survive, but how does one THRIVE in this place?
It’s fairly important to find some positive things about the winter that can bring joy to this half of the year. Among those of us working on this book, we’ve found
- The sky can be spectacular. Ice crystals in the upper atmosphere give us a variety of beautiful optical effects such as sun pillars, sun dogs, pillars, and halos. On clear, moonless nights, the winter stars can be close enough to touch. Auroral displays of various colors can pulse and arc across more than half the sky.
- If it gets cold before much snow falls you can ice skate on the wetlands for miles.
- It’s possible to ski to work at least a few times each year.
And then there’s summer!
Summer in the North Country can be absolutely fabulous and the best part is that summer is the time of year that we academics have some time and freedom to enjoy the seasons. The Adirondacks provide fine recreation in hiking, swimming, boating, and just lying about the beach. The Adirondack Mountain Club, and its local Laurentian Chapter offer many opportunities to enjoy the outdoors with other people who match your skill level no matter what it is. A Rocky Mountain chauvinist on the faculty made huge progress toward recovery when she realized that you can get somewhere and back in a day hike in the Adirondacks instead of having to backpack in for a couple days. And it’s so nice to shower after a hike! Books describing hikes of a variety of lengths in the local area abound so be sure to browse the SLU bookstore’s regional section. There are also lectures, slide shows and scads of cultural opportunities including county fairs, bluegrass festivals, concerts in the parks, and serious theater.
And then there’s Canada!
Ottawa, a lovely small city that is also a national capital, is only an hour’s drive north. Major cultural productions make their way to Canada’s capital and it’s easier to get from Canton to downtown Ottawa than from Long Island to Manhattan!! If you prefer the feel of a larger city, Montreal is two and a half hours northeast and Toronto is three and a half hours southwest. Both of those cities have major league baseball teams and, of course, hockey teams! If you’d prefer cities with a more European flavor, Quebec city, where you really do have to use some French, is five hours away. In truth, Canton’s only in the middle of nowhere in the US … when you look across the border, we’re not too far from anywhere! The author of this article is campaigning for the North Country to succeed from the USA and join Canada so we can live in the exclusive southern suburbs instead of the boondocks, sing the national anthem, and be in the orange band at the bottom of the weather map instead of the purple one at the top!! So far it hasn’t caught on! Speaking of Canada, we sing “our national anthems” up here so you might want to learn O Canada! To listen to it, check out http://canada.gc.ca/canadiana/anthm_e.html.
II. “No matter where I go, there’s someone I know!”
When you first arrive, you may find yourself treated with some suspicion by the locals. They’ll be polite (mostly), but the North Country natives are not quick to warm up to new people. The time it will take people to start to accept you depends on lots of factors, the greatest one being your “differentness” from them. If you’re an active Irish Catholic, the transition into the wider community could be fairly smooth, depending on the conservatism of your Catholic views. Given that most of you who are actually reading this are not practicing Irish Catholics, you can gauge the likely smoothness and completeness of your inculturation to your distance from that profile (a section for minority faculty will address this more fully), Even if you don’t become so integrated into the area, after a while in the Canton-Potsdam area, it’s hard to go anywhere … to the grocery store, restaurant, post-office, your front yard … and not see someone you know, or at least recognize. There’s not much anonymity in the North Country once PDF created with FinePrint pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.com 33 you’ve been here for a while. This is simply a given of the smallness of the towns. The downside can be a sense of living in a fishbowl of sorts (“Whose red Honda was that in your driveway last weekend?”), but the upside is that it can be a fairly safe area where it’s still common to leave houses unlocked, keys hanging in the ignition of unlocked cars, and UPS packages on the steps. One warning to women is to not drink too much in the Casa Blanca restaurant in Gouverneur!!
III. “My kingdom for a Home Depot”
No one from outside the North Country and only a few natives will deny that the shopping situation is grim. If you’ve just come from a metropolitan area filled with retail opportunities, this may be a more difficult adjustment than winter. The basic necessities … food, T-shirts, hammers and screwdrivers … are available locally. But selection and variety are necessarily limited. Some of the local standards are Wal-Mart in Massena and Ogdensburg. Malls in Massena (Rt. 37 east toward Malone), Watertown (just off I81 at Arsenal St.), and Syracuse (the Carousel Mall is just off I81 on Hiawatha Blvd.). There is now a Home Depot in Massena and another right off of I81 in Watertown, and a Lowe's in Ogdensburg.
Fortunately, catalogs abound and we’re only one extra day away from the world south of the Adirondacks via UPS, Fed Ex, and USPS! The web is a great resource for more and more items. It’s at least a good place to learn about products when there’s no opportunity for “browsing” in stores. However, all of us end up making a few shopping pilgrimages each year. Fortunately, within 3 driving hours, there’s Syracuse, Burlington, the largest city in Vermont (complete with a downtown pedestrian mall), Montreal and Ottawa across the northern border with underground and tunnel-linked shopping, as well as most big US chains (Home Depot). Boxing day (the day after Christmas) is a big sale day in Canada and you can get the GST (Canadian Taxes) back by filing a form available at US Customs. Shopping can be a good excuse to take a Saturday off in spite of a stack of grading, particularly if you can find a friend to come along … ask around, you might be surprised at the enthusiastic response to the offer of a shopping trip!
IV. “Where is there to eat around here?”
One of the most distressing aspects of the North Country for those of us from elsewhere is the small number of interesting restaurants. It will take all of a semester for you to sample just about every local restaurant and after a year or two even the Olive Garden and Red Lobster will seem exciting. Among SLU faculty there’s some agreement that the best food around is served at SLU catered dinners! Unless some of us go into the restaurant business, there’s not much we can do about this!! But at least make sure you try all the local hot-spots: See Restaurant chapter. Aileen O’Donoghue is the primary author of this chapter