Minnewaska Musings

By Paul Gremmels

   I once gave a friend of mine, who happens to be a physicist, a ride to the airport. It was a brutally cold, subzero day with wind gusts in the twenty to thirty mile per hour range. As we began our trip, the conversation was of course about the current weather conditions. It was indeed a cold day, with highs in the minus single digits. My friend the physicist, immediately went with “what not to say” when a friend gives you a ride to the airport on a cold winter day.

   “You know.” He said. “There really is no such thing as ‘cold’.”

   All the beautiful poems and prose Robert Frost wrote about winter tend to wear a little thin when you have to swap out a car battery, on the shoulder of a wind swept road in twenty below weather.

   I once owned a gigantic, white, rusted out, four door Caprice Classic. I called her “The Whaler.” One cold winter night, I was driving The Whaler back to college when the headlights began to dim. Actually, they would dim for a bit and then shine brightly for a moment, then dim again, causing your head to bob back and forth as you leaned forward, straining to see in the dim light and then back again as the headlights grew brighter. My brother, who has some mechanical knowledge, had told me that the problem was caused by a bad alternator. I didn’t agree with him and had bought a new battery, which sat on the floorboard of the passenger side. (In the end, it turned out that we were both right) The headlights continued to dim for longer periods of time, until it seemed as though the darkness was pushing the light back up under the hood. Finally, The Whaler stalled out and we drifted to a stop next to a grove of trees. The process of changing the battery out on that cold windy night was arduous at best. I had a crescent wrench, pliers and even a flashlight, but the fact that you, at some point in the process, had to take your gloves off made the job torturous. I looked toward the nearby woods and thought of Robert Frost’s poem; “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I had wondered how Robert Frost would have felt if he were with me right then?  I began to think ill of Robert, and recited the poem aloud, interjecting expletives at key points. I then began to make up my own iambic tetrameter verses. Like, “There once was a battery from Nantucket . . . “

   

As we drove along towards the airport in The Whaler, my  physicist friend continued to pontificate about there being no such thing as “cold.” Evidently, according to him, all things in physics are measured by mass, temperature, luminous intensity and I can’t recall what else he said. The fact is, that cold has no measure. Only the lack of heat, which is a measurable energy. I pointed out a nearby wood that we were driving past and asked my friend, the physicist, “if he had ever stopped by a woods on a snowy evening?” He had not and wondered aloud, “why I would ask such an irrelevant question?”