Glad I didn't experience an Iowa winter in the 1930s

Cold is just a state of mind — until your water freezes up, then it becomes real.

This past week the lowest temperature I saw on any of my weather apps that show local conditions was 1 degree Fahrenheit. On my vehicle’s outside temperature, I saw it get to 5 one night. That is far from record-breaking or even what I’ve seen, but it was the coldest in a long time.

Fortunately, my water where I live did not freeze up, but my kitchen sink, which is on a northeast facing wall has been known to freeze. I always try to remember to open up the cabinets and leave it dripping if it’s going to be in the single digits. I forgot one of the cold nights last week and I dreaded turning it on to see the next morning. It hesitated for a moment, coughed and sputtered and gave up coffee water thankfully.

Those of us that grew up in one of the old farm houses around the county know what it’s like in one of those draughty old dwellings when the weather gets cold. Stucco and sheetrock are poor insulation so the answer was to pile more kids into one bed and pile more quilts atop said bed.

We only had one of those stand-alone gas heaters in the living room and it was a race to get in front of it to get dressed. I can remember Dad laying on the ground with a rolled up newspaper torch or a propane torch trying to thaw out frozen pipes. I got a little of that experience personally after I moved out.

The first two places I lived were one-bedroom trailer houses and the first one didn’t have much in the way of plumbing. I wanted to keep what I did have moving so I purchased this stuff called electric heat tape that you wrapped around exposed pipe to keep it from freezing. The heat tape worked great on the exposed pipe, but the plumbing inside the floor froze solid for a week during one particularly bad cold spell.

I’d been making due with a single electric space heater that I moved around. I ended up investing in a second space heater just to aim underneath my cabinets at night. By the next winter I had a better insulated trailer with siding.

My other cold-weather experience also happened in a mobile home, this one in the mountains of Colorado. We got a visit from the mother-in-law the first year we lived in Colorado on the week of Thanksgiving. You guessed it, we got record-low temperatures and a foot of snow the day she stepped off the bus. The next morning the only water we had was what we had wisely saved in jugs and in the bathtub.

Employing the techniques I’d seen my father use years before, I thawed all the exposed pipe that wasn’t properly covered with heat tape but it still wasn’t flowing. Finally, I determined that the pressure pump sitting three feet under the ground in a covered pipe was frozen.

I loaded up the mother-in-law to show her beautiful downtown Ridgway’s only hardware store where we purchased a mechanic’s drop light to drop down in the hold and thaw the pump out.

Mother-in-law, who was always short of patience and didn’t like to be inconvenienced, was having a grand old time. She said the negative-18 temperatures and snow reminded her of growing up in Des Moines, Iowa. All I know is I’m glad I didn’t grow up in Iowa in the 1930s.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

[email protected]