Negative Forty

 

Just another family of moose trying to beat the cold snap

I live for this weather. I take some sort of sick pride in my thermometer reading -30 when I wake up. Neighbors posted photos of -40. Farmers in central Montana shared pics of -71 with wind chill. One of the best parts of the internet is commiserating about the frigid weather. Everyone is saying the same thing below their picture of a thermometer; maybe this will drive out the so-called invaders from California and elsewhere. It might kill a few pine beetles too. 

Alas, I found two pine beetles crawling across my living room this morning. Like anything smart, they found a warm place indoors. It occurred to me that anyone moving here from California can afford to heat their houses. Their houses are also big enough that they won’t go insane sitting inside for a couple days. That’s why the Californians invented the internet, so that they wouldn’t get bored indoors. They literally invented Facebook where all these tough Montanans are posting pictures of how the Californians are regretting their move to Montana. I don’t want to give the Californians too much credit, but I think they will survive. They didn’t move here because they didn’t understand what they were getting into. They moved here because it is mostly still wild and undeveloped. They moved here because houses were half the price of where they came from. They moved here because you can brag about it being -40 without feeling much hardship from it. They moved here because everyone here likes to brag that Montana is for hard core people. Hard core people are cool. People who want to be cool go to the places where hard core people are. That is high school social science 101; do what the cool people do and you might be seen as cool too.  

This is just another version of the lyrics from the classic Eagles song “The Last Resort.” Call someplace paradise, kiss it goodbye. Everyone driving around with Best Last Place stickers and Montana Is For Badasses entice far more outta-staters than this cold snap will ever drive out. The sad realization is that this cold snap is more likely to bankrupt all of our poor neighbor Montanans who can barely afford to heat their doublewides than it is going to drive out a bunch of rich newcomers. Have you tried to hire a plumber recently? A couple burst pipes may bankrupt someone living on a fixed income. All of our local neighbors had to get up and go to work today doing all the jobs that the outta-staters don’t need to do. They live here because it used to be cheap and there wasn’t much competition for land because how do you sell a view? 

There was a time not long ago when most of the country would hear about this kind of weather a couple days after it happened. A few grainy news videos and a bunch of people in warmer climates shaking their heads and questioning why anyone would want to live there. Now, we all get on social media and post videos of normal people shoveling snow in our shorts and t-shirts then panning to a thermometer that reads -40. #Montana. #Badass.

That breaks the myth for all those people who worry that -40 would cause their noses to fall off. Anyone can survive -40 for five minutes before they retire to their comfy chair by the electric fireplace. If you want to blame the Californians for anything, blame them for the fact that they figured out how to sell a view. Then we all ate that technology up. We figured out how to tell our personal stories on those platforms. In doing that, we fed into that machine by posting pictures of badass life. And now these are the consequences; other people want what we have come to take for granted. It sure isn’t the only thing contributing to the boom of outta-staters buying everything up, but it sure isn’t helping. Not much we can do about it now. I just thought this as I considered posting a picture of my thermometer. Instead, I came up with this rant.