Winter Texans: Cold? What cold? 
BY DAN PARKER
SOUTH JETTY REPORTER

On Monday, Jan. 15, when practically everyone else in Port Aransas was staying indoors, hiding from blustery winds and temperatures in the high 30s, Terry Harrington decided to take a walk. Texans: Cold? Harrington, a Winter Texan, bundled up

and strolled a few miles down the beach, from Sandcastle Road to Horace Caldwell Pier and back. He saw not one other soul on foot the whole time (except for an intrepid South Jetty reporter/photographer). It was "pretty cool," as he put it -- but nothing like the sub-zero temperatures Cold? What he has endured in the past at his home in

McBain, Mich.

"I'm the type of guy who can't stay inside," Harrington said. "I have to be outdoors. That's one of the reasons I like coming down here (to Port Aransas). I can be outdoors in the months of January and February, and I don't get cabin What cold? fever like I do at home and have to be inside at home up there."

While many native South Texans hunker close to their heaters, Winter Texans hardly flinch when northers blow through Port Aransas. That was the case on Monday, when an Arctic cold front roared into the region, dropping temperatures from the high 60s to the mid-30s.

The low in the Port Aransas area on the morning of Wednesday, Jan. 17, was in the mid-30s, according to the National Weather Service office in Corpus Christi. Forecasters expected a general warming trend over the next few days, with high temperatures of about 40 on Wednesday, about 50 Thursday; upper 40s Friday, low 50s Saturday, mid -50s Sunday and about 60 Monday.

At this cold front's peak, temperatures plunged so low that local forecasters even were talking about a slight chance of sleet.

But this is not real cold, Winter Texans will tell you. Harrington can tell you about real cold.

Harrington is retired now, but when he was working, he was a forestry foreman with the Michigan Department of Transportation. Part of his job was clearing snow from roads with snowblowers.

In 1978, a blizzard dumped 48 inches of snow overnight where Harrington lived and worked. Temperatures, he recalled, sank to 25 degrees below zero, with a wind chill 60 below.

"The heat in our trucks wouldn't even keep us warm. We had to wear warm clothing inside the truck," Harrington said. "We had to scrape the windshields on the inside to kept them clear of ice."

Harrington suffered frostbite on the tips of his fingers when he spent about 30 minutes doing maintenance work on the severely cold metal parts of a snowblower. "To this day, I have only slight feelings in the tips of the fingers," he said.

Also unimpressed with the cold spell that recently hit Port Aransas is Winter Texan Ralph Cottam, who lives in Winnipeg, Canada, six months of the year.

"This is not cold," Cottam said. "Thirty-five and 40 below zero -- that's cold."

One winter night about 15 years ago in Winnipeg, Ralph got in his Ford Escort and drove only a short distance before hearing a thumpathumpa sound, as if he had a flat. He got out, looked around and found that the temperatures of about 30 degrees below zero had frozen the rubber solid on his tires.

"All four of the tires, where they were parked, were flat on the bottom," he said. "Just the weight of the car made them flatten out. Not FLAT-flat, but flat spots. It took about 10 minutes of driving around before they got rounded out again."

On Tuesday, Jan. 16, Winter Texan Mary Ann Gregory of Dysart, Iowa, said she was comfortable with the temperatures in the high 30s.

"This doesn't bother me at all," said Gregory, a retired teacher. "It seems like a nice day. There have been days when I was out walking in shorts and T-shirts, and I would walk by a building where city workers were, and they had on parkas. ... I thought it was a nice day."

Gregory can remember the drapes freezing and becoming stuck to the windows in the elementary school where she worked back in Iowa some years back.

"I would let the kids practice their spelling words by writing in the frost on the windows, which was sort of a novelty," Gregory said.

Winter Texan Joyce Williams remembers particularly a blizzard that struck Nebraska during the winter of 1948-49, when she was a child.

During the blizzard, Williams was playing with a friend in their hometown of Wood Lake, Neb., when they suddenly noticed a large herd of cattle walking down the highway in front of Williams' friend's house, which was in the middle of town.

"The cattle will move with the wind," said Williams, who now lives in Ogallala, Neb. "And they'll go if they can get out of their fence, and in this case they did, because the snow was so deep that they could just walk right over."