I’m often asked by
relatives and friends back East how I stand the winters in
northwestern Wyoming. I put on a stoic facade and tell them:
It’s tough, but we Cody folks can suck it up. What I
don’t mention is that an average of 300 days of sunshine
annually isn’t hard to take, nor are temperatures in the
balmy 60s on the occasional Thanksgiving or Christmas. In fact, if
you prefer a white Christmas, you can do better in the Northern
Rockies than in Cody.
Thanks to a frost-chasing wind
called the chinook, Cody is spared extended periods of frigid
temperatures and heaping snows, averaging only about 35 inches of
snow annually (though for some places, of course, close to three
feet of snow a winter is too much). One of the reasons Buffalo Bill
Cody chose to plunk his namesake town down on the prairie east of
the Absarokas was his fondness for mild winters. He knew that Crow
Indians had historically wintered here.
“Chinook” is a
Salish word meaning “snow eater,” and I’ve seen it eat six
inches of snow overnight, leaving slush and mud. In his book Wolf
Willow, Wallace Stegner described it as “a wind as warm as milk.”
According to meteorologists, the phenomenon is the result
of Pacific cold fronts traversing the Rockies and dumping snow west
of the Continental Divide. On the east slope of the mountains, the
now-dry air descends and warms. In Cody’s case, it blasts
down the South Fork Valley and through Shoshone and Clark’s
Fork canyons.
So there’s a price to be paid for not
having to shovel the driveway often, and not having to warm up the
car when it’s 50-odd degrees on a February or March morning:
We have to endure the wind.
These westerly gale-force
winds, usually 30 or 40 miles per hour, can blow for days. Two,
three, four days. Relentlessly. It gets on your nerves. Your eyes
tear up from all the grit and dust blowing around. Plastic grocery
bags festoon the bare branches of the cottonwoods like Buddhist
prayer flags. The wind rips clothes from the backyard line. And
Cody is always in the top five Wyoming towns for bad hair days.
When the delivery kid tosses the newspaper in the front
yard, it sometimes ends up in the neighbor’s yard, or even
across the street. Letters blow out of mailboxes. After just a few
months, new flags look like tattered Civil War banners. Hats
abruptly fly off heads like a gag in a Marx Brothers movie. On bad
days, trees are uprooted and shingles peeled off roofs.
At my house, the wind thumps a cottonwood limb on a corner of the
roof, so that I sometimes wake in the night thinking that someone
is knocking on my door. My living room windows are drafty, and even
when they’re closed, the wind moves the curtains. Heavy gusts
make the windows vibrate with a weird buzz.
The chinook
can seem downright apocalyptic at times. During the height of the
drought a few years ago, a portion of Buffalo Bill Reservoir dried
up, and a cloud of brown dust blew off the lakebed and over
adjacent subdivisions, causing some folks to seal up windows and
put towels under doors.
On the lighter side, one of my
neighbors spends autumn weekends tidying up her yard with a leaf
blower. She’s meticulous in cleaning the leaves out from
under the hedges, but if the wind blows the next day, she’ll
have new leaves that may have traveled miles to land in her yard.
Oh, well, Westerners are an optimistic lot.
As am I. Hope
springs eternal. After all, the chinook exits with the winter,
right around the time that we’ve tired of its rough caresses.
By May, the hard gusts give way to gentler breezes that whisper
through the new-green cottonwoods. By full summer, the night wind
sways the curtains, and a sensuous sizzle in the trees competes
with crickets for the attention of the ear. And the world is
drowsily stilled again.
For a few months.
Bill Croke is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado
(hcn.org). He is a writer in Cody,
Wyoming.
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