A Minnesota Monster Storm

It was March 1, 1965. My friends and I were looking forward to graduating from college in St. Cloud, Minnesota. We were studying for our third quarter finals when the blizzard struck. We were used to snow, but totally unprepared for what was coming. 

I lived in an off-campus house with five other women. Most of us had turned twenty-one, the legal drinking age in Minnesota, and we liked going to the local college bar, about a mile away. It didn’t take much for us to take a study-break and head for the bar, to eat hamburgers and sometimes have more to drink than we probably should have. 

That night it started snowing while we were at the bar. I was the only person with a car, but I left it at home. We were used to walking a mile and usually we weren’t in any hurry to get home. Besides, I knew I would rather spend money on bourbon than on gasoline. The bar was crowded and noisy. We were having a lot of fun, when my roommate came and yelled in my ear, 

“We’ve got to get Sonia home.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s in the bathroom, throwing up. She’s so drunk she can’t stand.”

Oh, my! We looked outside and saw that the weather was getting serious. We bundled Sonia into her Minnesota parka, hat, scarf and gloves, and started the trek toward home. Sonia kept falling into snowbanks. No amount of cajoling could get her to walk more than a couple of steps. This was 1965 in rural, college-town Minnesota. There were no cell-phones. Everyone was hunkered down inside their homes, as the blizzard howled and quickly covered everything in snow.

That’s when we spotted a toboggan on someone’s porch. We weren’t going to steal it. We just wanted to borrow it. We needed to get Sonia home. We pulled the toboggan off the porch and into the street. We dumped Sonia onto the toboggan and she immediately passed out. 

By the time we reached our front door, we were wet and cold. We knew we were lucky to have made it home. It took four of us to drag Sonia off the toboggan, into the house and onto her bed. We peeled her out of wet clothes and  into warm pajamas. We covered her up in extra blankets and knew she was going to have a terrible hang-over the next day.

Meanwhile, the blizzard was getting worse. I went outside, tied a bandana to the antenna of my car, and hoisted the antenna as high as it would go. That was a signal to the snowplow that there was a car buried in the snow, in case drifts covered my car. Which they did.

That weekend, it snowed twenty-two inches, with drifts over three feet. The following weekend, it snowed again ~ another eighteen inches, with drifts again over three feet. And on St. Patrick’s Day, the third weekend in March, there was a third blizzard. School was cancelled. My car was hopelessly buried and even snowplows couldn’t get down the street. One of the drifts was higher than our front door.

A few resourceful students managed to cascade out second-story windows on sleds made of cardboard. They walked to the liquor store ~ the only business open ~ to buy cases of beer. They sold it to thirsty students who tunneled their way to the street to celebrate that finals were cancelled. 

The National Guard was called to load snow onto trucks and pile it in vacant lots. That year, St. Cloud went sixty-six days in a row without seeing the sun.

That was the last winter I spent in Minnesota. By September, I was on my way I way to Denver, where even when it snows, we know it won’t be long before the sun shines again.