This week we’re hearing from Josh Lynch in Fairbanks. Originally from Texas and Arkansas, Lynch will be experiencing his first snowy winter this year.
LYNCH: I feel like I have what any person from the south would consider a moderate exposure to snow. I can remember maybe a day every two or three years where school would be cancelled on account of snow. But of course in Arkansas, school gets cancelled on account of an inch maybe an inch and a half of snow and often that’s gone by lunch time.
The last 5 or 6 years, I’ve spent three or four months traveling around in Alaska every year, but only in the summer when I can sleep in my tent and it’s not so scary outside. I’m pretty nervous about being in a place that’s cold and dark and snowy for the first time ever.
I’ve tried to all the things that you can sort of do to be prepared I suppose: firewood, extra jackets, blankets. I’ve got all my friends coaching me with advice on how best to survive and stay active.
A light north face flannel, a light north face half zip is a winter jacket in Texas. You’re lucky if you get to wear it three days a year. So moving into cold weather gear is totally foreign to me. I don’t have the first idea of how to begin to shop for this kind of stuff. So anytime that I’m looking at any kind of item at all, I have four or five different people I turn to opinions for. People I trust don’t want to see me turn into a Popsicle.
Now you make a good point in that, if there was anything worse than it being incredibly cold and incredibly dark and snowy it might just be incredibly cold and incredibly dark. That’s something I’m not quite prepared for mentally yet either as I sort of imagine Alaskan winters it’s that snowy white on top of spruce trees, up on top of your cabin the whole 9 yards, but if there’s not any snow, I’m not sure I’ll be able to handle it too well emotionally anyway.
Zoe Sobel is a reporter with Alaska's Energy Desk based in Unalaska. As a high schooler in Portland, Maine, Zoë Sobel got her first taste of public radio at NPR’s easternmost station. From there, she moved to Boston where she studied at Wellesley College and worked at WBUR, covering sports for Only A Game and the trial of convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
