There’s a small, local coffeehouse a few blocks from our house and ‘Her Imperial Grace, etc’ and I have just returned from the daily early morning walk. Today is one of those cold-as-hell days that Suckatomato experiences whenever the jet stream sends a frigid polar cold front down to tickle this placid region (28 deg F.) in winter. Despite all the California Tourist Bureau’s hype about ‘sunny California’, our winters can be surprisingly frigid at times. Looked at another way, if half the state isn''t being burned to the ground by wildfires, it''s freezing to death in the grip of a winter, jet-stream-induced polar low.

However, it’s a temporary affliction we suffer inconsequentially as soon enough we’ll be back to our typical sweltering summertime highs (30% humidity, given that this berg lies astride the great Suckatomato River that flows down to the SFO Bay).

For me, a really cold stretch such as this is immeasurably refreshing, because I am a person who only comes fully alive only when the temp plunges like a Red Tail Hawk in full swoop, in pursuit of some hapless little critter it has spotted from up high.

The girl has had her semi-regular croissant, and the bitter bite of my Doppio (double espresso) is still residually palpable on my palette, so all is well in my world (for the moment). I’ve additionally just returned from taking my screaming yellow zonker of an old Porsche out for its weekly run-up on the nearby interstate and despite the cold, it started right up like the sweetheart it is and we completed our usual 10 miles or so, as per usual. Then back to the barn, once again.

It’s always amusing to check out the various stares and glances those on the freeway shoot at my car (its name is ‘Jezibel’) as they pass by (often at obscenely illegal speeds, far above the posted limits). I don’t have anything to prove, of course, so I am a model of California Vehicle Code conformity on these jaunts. My Poor-She is now more than 51 years old, more than just an automotive veteran, and despite its age, provides me with a weekly stab of joy in my otherwise mundane life in aptly-named city named ‘Suckatomato.’

Californica is full, of course, of teenage-mentality pseudo-adults who were raised in (or at least conditioned in) the bosom of the state’s indigenous ‘car culcha’, and for them the sight of a small, well-appointed (and capable) Poor-She appears to be akin to a red flag waved in front of a bull. The usual, banal ‘I’m-ahead-of-you’ compulsion these youthful cretins have becomes amplified, seemingly, as they race by, proving (to no one but themselves) that their particular bucket of bolts is the better car. That’s just fine with me, of course, since at my age I have nothing left to prove or otherwise vindicate. I’m just happy to have in my possession a beautiful, classic (1974) specimen of Dr. Porsche’s automotive genius in my custody and it gives me all the sangfroid I need at this late stage of life. After all, when you’ve formerly bored holes in the sky at 60 thousand feet and reached speeds in excess of 2000 miles an hour in hot jet interceptors, what’s left to prove? “Show me yours and I’ll show you mine?” I hardly think so.

So I tool along at a steady 65 mph and just enjoy the hell out of these unconstrained weekly reminders of former youthful, hormonal excesses. Wifie is away at her church, this being Sunday morning, which is just great, since it frees me up to enjoy this weekly ritual without any disproving distaff admonishments to cloud up the immediate horizon.

Of further interest is that fact that most of those young speed-crazed drivers on the freeway haven’t a clue as to what a 51-year-old Poor-She looks like or is, since they are not into cars beyond a desire to buy the latest, gree-whiz Subaru Cross-Trek or Furd (sic) Mush-tang. Only those like me who’ve passed over the outer shoals of life and are heading into harbor (towards the Grim Reaper’s dock) have a glimmer of what the flashy yellow car I’m in actually is. That’s sad, but the Porsche 914 has always been the ‘bastard brother’ among Porsches (Porsche considered it a mere ‘entry-level’ Porsche/Volkswagen offspring and not a ‘real Porsche’…although it definitely is that) and while most know what a 911 is, too often the atypical design styling of the 914 eludes them.

I’m sure the pup (“Her Imperial Grace”, etc.) would prefer to be flying copilot next to me at such moments, but in her senior dotage she’s become somewhat of a nervous traveler (and my seat restraints don’t fit her, anyway), so these weekly rendezvous with Jezibel are mine and mine alone.

When I visit that coffeehouse I referred to above, it’s typically about 8AM or so (on Sundays) and I always enjoy sitting outside on their al fresco deck, bundled up in my Finnish SARMA parka (a modern Finnish take on the old Sierra Designs classic mountain parka that is itself modeled somewhat after the British SAS cold-weather parka). Remember…the Brits had need of such gear back when they were briefly on holiday in the Falkland Islands…and they really know how to protect their troops from cold, near-Arctic extremes. The Finns are also experts in extreme cold-weather protective gear (think ‘Susi’ here) and they make commercially available super-cold winter weather gear that is the equal of any available anywhere on the planet.

Since few Suckatomatans are foolish enough to sit outside in sub-freezing weather and freeze their private parts off while sipping coffee, my table is always available for the girl and I. She gets her obligatory croissant, I my Doppio, and we take in the sights that avail casual onlookers enfolded within Ma Nature’s frosty January embrace. Occasionally, someone headed inside the place, will stop to admire the girl and remark on the fact that she’s lost her right eye. Sad as that fact may be, it always sparks a brief conversation which, in our present social climate centered around smartphones and social media, is always a refreshing change of pace.

“Is she friendly?” the wiser ones start off with. Despite my assurances that she would eagerly meet them at our front door with the spare housekey gripped in her teeth and take them on a tour of our home, they’re always a bit chary at first, since those Game of Thrones images of archaic Direwolves appear to still be fresh in many minds. Once they sink their fingers into her wealth of luxurious neck fur, all misapprehensions vanish and then they’re off to have the barista pull a hit of whatever for them.

The girl, for her part, is perfectly nonchalant about all the fuss over her, as her single remaining ice-blue eye is focused solely on me, trying to determine whether or not there’s some delectable morsal of pastry left uneaten on the dish on top of my table that I’ve missed.

Despite my being a born & bred native of this large, progressively constipated and politically dysfunctional Pacific Coast state, where balmy skies usually prevail, I’ve always loved cold weather…the colder the better…so today’s chill is delightful.

Perhaps that’s a legacy of having first gotten into mountaineering and climbing when I was entering my undergrad phase, back in the People’s Republic of Berzerkeley. The Cal Hiking Club (better known as the UCHC), despite its seemingly unpretentious and innocuously sounding name, included some ferociously formidable (read: serious) climbers (of both ice and rock). For my part, I was always quite moderate in undertaking my chosen mountain adventures, preferring calculated risk adventures to life-or-death situations.

As I’ve said many times before, I never denied my rep in the UCHC as “the little old lady of the peaks”, since I was a very careful climber who always aimed to live a good, long time before I haplessly plunged off some impossible rock face. But I did participate in some serious adventures on occasion, despite my natural reticence over needlessly hanging my tender young derriere over a chasm of Utter Doom.

One trip I went on that I clearly recall was a winter excursion out in the central Sierra Nevada Mountains, to the beautiful Mineral King Wilderness Area. That was back when Walt Dizzy (1965) was negotiating for a Federal permit to lease the spectacular Mineral King wilderness area and turn it into another of his ‘Happiest Places on Earth’ for bored proles.

My UCHC buddies and I thought it might be the last chance ever to experience this singularly pristine natural area before Mickey and his cohort of Dizzy characters ran rampant there, so we quickly put together a ski-mountaineering trip to visit it in the midst of a cold, frosty winter.

Little did I know or even suspect that the leader of our trip had packed along a substantial supply of Pakalolo (super-potent Hawai''ian ‘crazy weed’) in his rucksack. I wasn’t much of a fan of the stuff since instead of having a positive effect on me, it tended put me right to sleep. Some party ‘player’ I was! Give me a toke and suddenly I was snoozing in the corner of the room. Our fearless leader, on the other hand, was known to light up just about anywhere, back in Berzerkeley. For him, being a stoner was nearly a way of life.

The trip out to Mineral King was beautiful and proceeded uneventfully, despite a huge amount of snowfall that had blanketed the natural area several nights before we left Berkeley, so when we reached a potentially good campsite, high up on a ridge, we set up a base camp, pitching our Sierra Designs Glacier tents there. On both sides of this site were rather steep precipices and, since at that early date in our blossoming mountaineering careers none of us were skilled and adept climbers, we blithely pitched camp right on this windswept ridge (albeit on a somewhat flattened part of it).

The weather report back in Berkeley had indicated that although a front was moving in later, we should have been good for a few days of sun and uninterrupted mild conditions, so after cooking up a big pot of ‘Glop’ (a mountaineer’s stew, containing mostly Ramen, but also anything else conveniently at hand to toss into it), we checked the tents’ snow-stakes (flat, bladelike snow anchors that looked like a small shovel blade) to be sure they were firmly secured and after a bellyful of Glop, turned in.

That night, at first all was calm and pacific. Then, at about 1AM, we woke up to find that the tents were shaking like a Quaking Aspen tree in Fall. Not only that, but outside the snow was falling with a vengeance, threatening to bury our tents. Whether the snow would collapse the tent first or the tent would be blown down one of the two steep slabs on each side of us would have been enjoyably debatable, had we been in the basement meeting room at Sproul Plaza. Out here, in the middle of a furious and sudden-onset storm, it was a needless academic concern no one had time for in the press of the moment; the more immediate concern was, did we relish being buried under all that falling snow or being wrapped up in a tent as it was forcefully deposited in a cravasse at the bottom of a thousand foot wall of ice & snow.

Our fearless leader was unconcerned about our prospects of imminent doom, though, as the rest of us in my tent morbidly contemplated being discovered frozen stiff in the spring, some months away, by a party of back-woods Rangers. So what does Fearless Leader do, but pull out the MaryJane, light up a big doobie and pass it around, suggesting we all relax and enjoy the show! Gaak!

The tent quickly filled up with the intoxicating grass fumes, so whether we relished the idea or not, all of us quickly succumbed to the effects of the grass. Despite my usual tendency to fall asleep after a toke or two, I was too keyed up to relax a whit in the throes of what I saw as my personal death-watch, and the next few hours before dawn were merely grass-enhanced moments of sheer terror.

Finally, someone among us was able to roust himself from the lethargy and clumsily exited the tent to sweep off a layer of accumulated snow and frost rime that was weighing the rain-fly down, doubtlessly helping preserve our bare-assed safety…somewhat.

Those few hours will forever remain in my mind’s memory vault as one of the worst experiences ever in my early climbing days. Fortunately, the storm dissipated almost as quickly as it had begun and by dawn we were greeted once again with clear, if extremely cold, blue skies. The nearby peaks were like jagged ice spires. All around us were fields of unblemished, corniced snow, which while beautiful to behold, now presented a dangerous avalanche danger…itself a relatively new experience that beginners studiously want to avoid, if at all possible.

Shaken up quite a bit by this unexpected complication in our outing, we broke camp and headed gingerly out on our mountaineering skis, being inordinately careful to test the snow before setting off on a prospective route back to the trail head.

That was just one of a number of similarly precarious UCHC trips that followed at a later date, because the single most important rule of the UCHC was that ‘anyone who chooses to be a member can join…without qualification or questions asked’, a rule that was invariably honored. Basically, other than this, there were no additional rules, this being anarchic Berzekeley of the 60s and 70s. We even had a member show up for a 5-day, early Spring Grand Traverse of the Mokolumne Wilderness (the start of which lies over the hill from what is now the Kirkwood ski-resort) to Silver Lake carrying a 15-20 pound Coleman sleeping bag in his arms. No pack, just the sleeping bag and a plastic sack of food! Gaak, again! Oh yah, those were interesting times, to be sure.

For some odd reason, other than my fear of the rash decisions that often prevailed in the UCHC due to post-adolescent general craziness, I usually enjoyed extreme weather. And this despite being a bit on the ‘schlank’ side and easily chilled when the weather went down a few degrees below normal.

Much later, in the US Air Farce and based at ‘Why not Minot?’ (answer: ‘The Freezin’s the Reason!’) Minot Air Force Base, where winters temps regular plunged well below zero F. for several weeks at a stretch, I found I greatly enjoyed the rigors of prolonged extreme NoDak cold weather. Of course all my other cohorts were convinced I was certifiably insane, but as long as I had my faithful air-cooled 1962 VW convertible to ferry me across the frozen prairie wastes of North Dakota, and my Air Force issued N3B/F1B Arctic outfit in the back seat, I really never had much fear of the cold.

Today, as a geezer-in-training, I find that cold is a bit harder to endure without suitable gear, but I still savor extremes like today’s brief spate of below-zero weather as long as I’m dressed like Roald Amundsen at the South Pole.

My later professional buddies in Saudi Arabia, who found 140 degree F. summers on the high-desert a bit excessive, never learned of my fondness for extreme cold, but since the relative humidity of Riyadh and Taif was near bone-dry (5-10% RH), dry, such seeming extremes of heat proved reasonably easy to accommodate (for me, at least)…unlike the milder but humid environs of summertime Suckatomato.

But all that part of my life is a totally different story, to be covered, mayhaps, in other, future (or past) iterations of these periodic meanderings of mine down that rutted trail of life, called memory lane, that I am prone to trudge!

It’s now somewhat after lunch and Her Imperial Grace, etc. has finished her lunchtime chew-bone, I’ve had my daily noontime cup of bone broth and it’s a bit warmer outside as I prepare to take her over to the local park for her mid-day squirt & sniff excursion.

I’ll end this here, for the moment, since next Wednesday is the start of the New Lunar Year and I am under standing orders from wifie to clean my bathroom and vacuum a few rooms in the house so the Chinese Kitchen God will make a good report on us to the Heavenly Immortal Celestials. I have been putting this odious task off for a full week, already, so tomorrow is unavoidably ‘A-for-Action-Day.’ Also known, locally, as ‘Preserve Marital Harmony Day’, LoL.

Hopefully, this will not sully my reputation as a callous, die-hard male chauvinist pig…

Live long and procreate portentously! (as Star Trek’s Mr. Spock never said).