Think Global. Ski Local.

It’s April 15.

Even here in Minnesota, which we’ve been calling the Bold North ever since the Super Bowl came to town, spring ought to be thoroughly sprung.

I should be spending this weekend raking the dead vegetation out of the yard. Planting some bulbs. Oiling the chain on the bicycle.

Instead we got a blizzard.

We’re somewhere north of a foot of snow. It’s not done yet.

The snow was deeper than the dog when we took him out this morning. It made his morning constitutional a challenge.

Deep snow slows everything down. It turns the pace of life in 2018 into something closer to the pace of life in 1818. It blankets sound and motion and whatever might have been penciled into the schedule or the to-do list.

It cleanses the landscape and re-renders it in a pristine monotone.

I wondered about my son, who lives in Rochester and was on the schedule at the Mayo Clinic this particular Sunday. One of those jobs where you don’t get to call a snow day. When he texted that he’d taken his skis to work, it crystallized the thought that had been forming in my brain.

I got my own skis out of the rafters where I’d already stored them for the summer and took to the neighborhood streets.

There’s something right about skiing straight out your front door and down the middle of the street. No need to burn an ounce of gas driving to some distant recreational area. Consider it a service rendered by the late-spring blizzard.

A big blizzard is one of those oddities that brings everyone in the neighborhood out of the house to dig out and marvel. Community is alive and well when the snow gets deep in Minnesota. Deep snow pushes everything toward local. All the way down the street I chatted with the neighbors who’d emerged from their burrows to fire up their snowblowers.

My wife and I had made it to 5:00 mass on Saturday, right in the heart of the blizzard. Maybe fifty were in attendance. A hearty group of souls. Father Michael’s homily was about the great Halloween blizzard of 1989, which dumped three feet of snow on Minnesota. He lived in St. Paul at the time, and could only make it as far as Sweeney’s Saloon down the street. He said that by late afternoon the whole neighborhood was parked around tables in Sweeney’s back room. Like the wedding at Cana, the beer never ran out. Deep snow brings us together in ways that normal times don’t. After mass we worked together to push the drifted-in cars out of the parking lot.

I skied down the center of the street to Browndale Park and started making quarter-mile loops around its perimeter. The first time around was slow going, plowing deep furrows into the snow. The next time around I’d made a track. The skiing got faster.

The world felt soft and welcoming as a grandma’s lap. The dystopia of the week’s headlines was a million miles away. It’d didn’t matter that the surprise re-emergence of Old Man Winter wouldn’t keep the outside world at bay for long. A mid-April blizzard is a transitory affair, no matter how convincing it might seem at the moment.

I’d even had a mention in the Sunday paper on this particular morning. A reporter had interviewed me for a story about the barrage of TV ads that would be assaulting us in the coming election. I told him that if politicians wanted to rise above all the noise in the election they should try being nice. Who knows, maybe it will help.

Soon enough the snow will end and the week will begin and there’ll be time to contemplate things like the climate change that’s been melting the polar ice and tugging the jet stream south so the snow we usually get in November now comes during the part of the year when we ought to be playing baseball. Right now the peace of skiing around the neighborhood is fortifying me and big challenged like that don’t feel so insurmountable. Maybe that’s the positive part of the global climactic feedback loop.

The first kids are arriving at the big ski hill at the center of the park. There’s another skier in the street as I make my way home. More kids were dragging sleds toward the park. People are walking dogs. It’s starting to look like one of those winter crowd scenes painted by Hendrick Avercamp in the 17th century.

A solitary car tries to make its way down the street, but as of now this is alien territory for driving and not only because of the constant threat of getting stuck. We’ve taken the street for the neighborhood, the kids and the skiers and the dogs. When the blizzard is done we’ll give it back.