It was cold enough to freeze a brass well-digger’s monkey this week, or something like that. I had -15 at my house, with only a few inches of snow on the ground. So far, no frozen pipes, but it’s a concern. Our local water company went on a leak-plugging binge over the last couple of years, and for the first time in probably 40 years, we have a tight water system. So without all the movement caused by the leaks, the assumption is that things will start freezing any day now. The new pipes are buried a lot deeper, but to be on the safe side, we’ve got hoses running at strategic places.
It wasn’t all that long ago in Park City that the morning announcements on the radio included the advice to Old Town residents to leave the kitchen faucet running when it got cold like this. The pipes in the unheated crawl spaces were vulnerable, and the service lines from the street into the house were shallow and prone to freezing. And it wasn’t just Old Town. The Prospector neighborhood, before it got fully built out, had lots of cul-de-sacs with only one or two occupied houses on them, and lines there would freeze up regularly. While the resulting ice sculpture erupting in the street was quite interesting, the Rube Goldberg connection of one house to another with a daisy chain of garden hoses was less than ideal.
My hot tub is right below my upstairs bedroom window. Sometimes the access door to the mechanical compartment will work loose and vibrate. It makes enough noise to be annoying when I’m trying to sleep. So a week or two ago, I got ambitious and got all the potential rattles and vibrations isolated with rubber weather stripping and duct tape. The hot tub is now silent. So now, instead of lying awake grumbling because it is so noisy, I’m lying awake hoping to hear the pump/heater cycle on just to confirm that it won’t be a block of ice in the morning. The night it hit -15, I actually got up and went out on the deck to stick a toe in, just to make sure it was still running.
The horses don’t seem to mind the cold all that much, but they are chomping through hay like there is no tomorrow. We need a conveyor belt from the barn. My brother has a new one that he brought out to the ranch this fall. It had been raised in a St. Regis Hotel on a tropical island where people brought it peeled carrots, al dente, on silver platters. It was freshly coiffured and pedicured. I’ve spent more nights sleeping outside than this horse. I’ve never been sure what triggers the growth of winter hair, but whatever it is, this horse didn’t get the memo. So we’ve had to keep him in a blanket. To try to encourage the hair growth, we meaning me because my brother lives in Salt Lake have been taking its jammies off in the morning and putting them on again at night for a while. I drew the line at reading it a story before tucking it in, and the horse is sulking. But it’s been so cold that it is just wearing the blanket all the time. There’s a little hair coming in, but he mostly just doesn’t get winter.
The skiing is still kind of limited, but what there is has been very good. Ordinarily, machine-made snow is nothing to get excited about. It tends to be hard, icy, and thin. But they’ve been able to take full advantage of this cold and have blown lots and lots of very good snow. It’s a guilty pleasure, skiing on snow that comes from massive water pumps and air compressors, and then gets pushed around with diesel snow-cats. Nothing green about it, no matter how many windmills the resorts subsidize. But it gets the resorts open, the employees trained to run the lifts, and when the holiday crowd shows up, hopefully bringing Mother Nature with them, we’re ready for prime time. If I go to hell for skiing on machine-made snow and soaking in a hot tub afterwards, well, I guess that’s the breaks. At least all my friends will be there, too.
We’ve had just enough snow to cause panic on the highways. The extreme cold reduces the effectiveness of the road salt, so things have stayed slick for longer than seems reasonable. And, as usual, people are driving like idiots. Clear off your windows all of them before hitting the road. That peephole the defroster makes really doesn’t do the job. If you want to avoid getting hit from behind, clear off the brake lights and turn signals, too. It’s just not that hard.
Tom Clyde served as Park City attorney in the 1980s and is the author of “More Dogs On Main Street.” He has been a columnist at The Park Record for more than 20 years.