Well, when you mess up, the best thing to do is just confess and get it over with. Two weeks ago, my parents visited, and while I could have put together a blog post between visiting with them and seeing two awesome musicals, I also had the mother of all colds, which meant that my schedule went like this: wake up exhausted, go to work, come home, have dinner with parents, sleep for an hour, spend time with parents, go to bed early, lather, rinse, and repeat for five days straight. I managed to sleep pretty much all day Saturday and Sunday, and the next week was all about playing catch-up, which included more trips to Subway than any man should ever make in a week. This is admittedly my fault, but I was also trying to make up for lost time in the gym and at kendo practice. In the craziness, things like this blog got sadly neglected, and I apologize to my legions of listeners who were waiting at their monitors with bated breath.
That being said, in a previous journal entry, I had talked about how mild the winter of 2011-2012 was. I made one or two statements to the effect that winters out here were usually harsh, but not this year. I also may have wondered how long this could last. Two weeks ago I got my answer—more or less the day after I wrote that stupid journal entry. It wasn’t just any snowstorm, either. No, it had to be a blizzard. An honest-to-goodness blizzard, albeit not one that shut the entire town down. It did give us about five or so inches of snow, and kept the traffic moving at speeds where most cars regularly got passed by snails heading south for the winter.
So I’m sitting in my apartment, a cup of tea beside me, and I figured I’d talk a bit this time about Cresco in winter. The feel of the whole town actually shifts a little, in my opinion.
First, there’s the Cresco Fitness Center. The place is practically overrun with people and activities from December to April, when the weather finally starts to break. This is partially because January is the month where people stop feasting, snacking and partying, get up on a scale, and promptly swear that they will eat right, they will go to the gym every single day and they will lose all the weight they gained and then some, a vow which usually lasts until about sometime in February, where people realize a.) weight doesn’t come off as fast as it goes on and b.) workouts actually require work. Until then, several people go to the fitness center, sign up for a few memberships, and spend a few sessions figuring out that buying the next size up in jeans is less tiring. It’s also mostly because the Cresco Fitness Center is home to a lot of what I suppose could be called “Intramural” sports—basketball teams and volleyball teams mostly, although there are some beginner gymnast classes, too. The divisions are pretty simple, just adults and children, and they’re not really playing for anything more than bragging rights. While I’m sure there are one or two people who take the competition entirely too seriously, as though an NBA scout might be hanging around Cresco waiting to snatch up some undiscovered talent, I am heartened to report I have not encountered anyone remotely like this. The Cresco Fitness Center is also hosting what they call a “Take Your Time” Triathalon, which basically means by April 28 you have to swim 10 miles, run 100 miles and bike/elliptical 200 miles. Rather, *I* need to do this, as I signed up for the event. We’ll see how tough I am, apparently.
Another thing that changes about Cresco in the wintertime is that snowmobiles come out to play. I cannot for the life of me figure out why snowmobiles are so popular in rural areas, and it’s especially confusing when you consider that there doesn’t seem to be much crossover between people who own other vehicles, like motorcycles. If I had to guess, I’d say snowmobiling is seen as safer than motorcycling, since if you fall off a snowmobile you land on snow instead of asphalt. Which is false, by the way, but we won’t get into that right now. The point is that immediately after sunset you can hear the buzz ofsnowmobile engines tearing around the outskirts of town, sounding like lions with particularly bad head colds.
I have to admit, I’m not a huge snowmobiling fan, mostly because the demographics tend to favor the young and foolhardy and the people who like to have a few drinks before they go out on their machines. This is what is known in the scientific world as “a recipe for disaster.” The mitigating factor, though, is that Iowa, being Iowa, has miles of snow-covered farmland which is great for snowmobiling. For those in need of a bit more exploration, the area around Decorah is filled with hills, cliffs and a ton of neat geography that I can see having a lot of fun exploring in an off-road vehicle. I will just say, though, if you do go out in one of those things, be careful. I had mentioned in a previous blog entry about seeing some roadside memorials on the top of about a twenty-foot cliff. Now that the snow has covered the roads and I see the snowmobile tracks layered on top of each other like coats of paint applied by a painter on LSD, I can come up with a couple of plausible, yet disturbing scenarios that involve someone on a snowmobile and a Wile E. Coyote-like drop.
Finally, there are the bars. There are at least five bars that I know of in a two-block radius in Cresco, which is kind of impressive and sad at the same time. I can’t really blame anyone in the winter for spending their Saturday nights indoors, with friends, and having a drink or two. The thing about bars, though, is that the people who hang around them are really not the people that you see in beer commercials. Most of them look kind of used up and sad, actually, like they would like to have something else to do but they don’t know what else is out there. I wonder if they’re aware of all the programs that the Cresco Fitness Center offers.
So that’s winter in northeast Iowa. We’re all hunkered down out here, peering through our windows and listening to the sound of lions with head colds out in the distance. Personally, I can think of much worse fates.
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