Matt of All Trades blog, like the title suggests, is by a Vermont author and offers offbeat musings on pop culture, media, journalism, humor, weirdness, stupid people, smart people, my life as a journalist, landscaper, photographer, married gay man, dog lover and weather geek and more. It's run by me, Matt Sutkoski, a native Vermonter living in St. Albans, Vt.
Cars on Highway 40 northeast of Montreal were caught for hours
behind a highway wreck. This being Canada, the obvious thing
that happened was a hockey game broke out on the
icy highway while people waited for the wreck to be cleared.
A couple days ago, Highway 40 in Quebec was terribly icy. Not surprisingly, a 40 to 50 car pileup occurred on the icy road about 25 miles northeast of Montreal.
Of course, I won't make light of that. Several people were hurt, thankfully none seriously. And hundreds of cars were trapped on the highway for hours, until the wrecks were cleaned up.
However, I do have to make light of one aspect of this crash.
They tell us to have an emergency kit in our car during the winter. You know, things like blankets, a shovel, snacks, a weather radio, that kind of thing. If this is any indication, a Canadian car winter emergency kit consists of hockey sticks and a couple of pucks.
A guy tried to smuggle Xanax from Canada into
Vermont by pulling a bunch of it on a sled
through the snow.
It's winter here in Vermont, so sometimes, if you've got a criminal enterprise going, you have to make allowances for the weather.
Such was the case last week, when a man in white winter camouflage clothing trudged through the snow through the woods from Quebec across the border into Vermont.
The Xanax this guy had is worth about $1.6 million, authories said.
Prosecutors said Cedrick Bourgault-Morin, 21, of Quebec was caught in the Vermont border town of North Troy after his trip across that border trip sensors that bristle in that area.
"Border Patrol agents who responded 'observed a single adult male, dressed in white camouflage clothing walking along the railroad tracks pulling a sled behind him. The sled contained one large duffel bag wrapped in white camouflage,' according to a criminal complaint written by Agent John McGarghan."
This happened Wednesday, and the weather was pretty good that day. Not much snow falling, not very cold. This guy would have been better off waiting for a blizzard so he couldn't be seen so easily.
But he's gotta meet demand. Addicts in the USA need their Xanax. Hell, the way the news and American politics has been going lately, everybody needs their Xanax.
Not surprisingly, authorities believe Bourgault-Morin's little winter adventure is part of a larger drug smuggling conspiracy. I'm sure they'll be asking him lots of questions. Maybe on Lake Champlain's thin ice, for all I know.
I wasn't in this mess, but if you caused a winter vehicle crash like this or made it
worse, just know that I and everybody else hates you.
To the person who caused a highway crash today on an icy winter highway:
I hate you. Intensely. Hundreds of other people really really hate you, too. Those hundreds of people who hate you were the ones caught in the traffic jam on the way to work this morning.
Because you are a stupid, selfish jerk who crashed into other cars, because you're stupid and selfish.
It's winter, so the roads tend to get icy. Especially after it snows and the temperature plunges to around zero.
To most people, I"m being Captain Obvious when I say that, but not you. Because you're oblivious. You are too trying to break land speed records, texting gossip to your boyfriend or girlfriend, swerving all over the place until you cause a crash.
My ire, of course, is not directed toward the unfortunate people who were driving cars that you smashed into. It's directed toward you.
I hope nobody got hurt. Except you. I hope you got hurt. Not hurt in a permanently debilitating way. Just hurt so you feel physical pain for the next few days. You deserve it.
Did you cause this crash because you subconsciously enjoy the attention? I know, I know. You didn't hop into your trash of a car or a pickup truck this morning and say, "I'm going to cause a big crash."
However, you have a sad, pathetic life and nobody pays attention to you, so maybe this is the way to get noticed? People will notice you now, when you drive like a maniac and crash into about five cars on the Interstate, right?
You caused the crash because you don't give a damn. You figure it's not your problem that you wrecked somebody else's car. Maybe injured them. Caused a five mile long backup that made lots of people late for work and school. Maybe made them lose some pay. Get chewed out by the boss. Miss an important final exam at the university.
You figure it's not your fault that police, fire and rescue personnel had to go out in this awful weather, perhaps risking their lives, to deal with morons like you who caused this crash.
Because it's never your fault, is it? Yeah, we shouldn't be on the road when you want to drive and text, drive and drink, drive and speed on ice, drive and do donuts on the middle of the Interstate. We should just let you have your fun and get out of the way, right?
Why were the rest of us driving so slowly, you ask. So slowly you were forced to drive with your car's front bumper an inch from the rear bumper of the car in front of you, instead of backing off a bit. You just had to crash into that car when he braked to avoid the snow plow, right.
Doesn't everybody understand they MUST drive dangerously fast, just to accommodate you? Doesn't everybody realize you're the most important person in the world?
You probably figure we are all in the way, that we shouldn't have been there when you spun your car out of control on the ice.
Now that you caused this winter highway crash, deep down you're loving it, aren't you? You're the center of attention. People are paying attention to you. It's negative attention, but hey, it's attention.
For once in your life, nobody is ignoring you. Feels good, doesn't it?
Again, I hope you got injured in the crash, just to take the shine off your moment of glory.
Now you can play the victim. Isn't that wonderful? You can blame the crash on someone else, when you tell all your friends about your adventure. How the other motorists didn't get out of your way. How the state DOT didn't clear the ice off the road.
Because, after all, to your mind, even if its 10 degrees with snow and freezing rain falling heavily, the DOT trucks are supposed to magically make the roads dry with not a speck of ice, right?
The DOT failed, in your mind. So you drove for the conditions you wish the roads were in, instead of the condition they actually were in.
Frustratingly for us, there are really no consequences to you for your driving this way in the winter. Sure, if the cops are in a particularly bad mood, they might write you a ticket. If you're especially unlucky, your insurance rates might go up a bit. You have to get your car repaired or replaced. Oh, boo-hoo.
But you're get off scot-free in terms of fixing the other cars you wrecked. Making up for lost wages for people who weren't working, but stuck in the traffic jam you created on this snowy highway. Are you going to pay us for the time we need to deal with insurance, bring our cars into repairs, get caught up at work?
No. Because you don't give a damn. Life is all but you, isn't it?
Look, all of us make mistakes, and any one of us might absentmindedly cause a crash. But more likely, it's you, habitually texting, drinking, speeding and driving like you need to get to your destination within a millisecond that's causing this problem.
You caused the crash this morning, and you will cause other ones in the future as well, I'm sure.
I wish the cops would jail people who cause these crashes. I wish the courts would somehow make you pay off all the people you hurt or inconvenienced. Revoke your drivers liscence permanently. Maybe put your name and picture on the Internet so you could be publicly shamed.
None of us know you, but as I said, we all hate you. I hope you somehow feel the hate rays.
Need an aspirin for your sore neck, asshole? Sorry, I took the last one for the headache you gave me.
Would it help if I tried to strangle you.? I won't. But many people want to.
To get an idea of how many stupid winter drivers there are out there, get a load of this Wisconsin DOT traffic cam on a snowy highway. Most people are driving carefully enough, but all it takes is maybe 10 percent of the motorists driving like maniacs to create ever worsening chaos:
Here in northwestern Vermont, where I live, large Lake Champlain has pretty much completely frozen over for the first time in seven years.
Ice fishing enthusiasts on Lake Champlain, Vermont in a photo I took two years ago. Unlike the people in the video in this post, this trio played it safe and walked only a thick, solid ice.
We've had a lot of really warm winters in the past decade, so there's been a lot of open water in recent years.
You'd think a lake in Vermont would freeze over every winter, but not with the mild temperatures we've had.
Until this year. It's been sort of cold, so we're back to walking on water on the lake.
Of course, no ice is completely safe, so there's always the danger of falling through. But the ice on most (but not all!) of Lake Champlain is thick and solid, so you can walk or even drive on it.
The lake has turned into a skating, skiing, ice fishing playground.
But in the spirit of warning people about the dangers of thin ice, pressure cracks and the like, we offer you this video of stupid people going out on ice that is decidedly NOT safe.
For your amusement and an instructional tutorial on what not to do in the winter, I present this very very funny compilation:
These guys don't look like members of the band Queen but they channeled the band when they annouced weather related school closings in Kentucky.
Thousands of schools are closed because it's just too dangerous on the roads to get the kiddies to the classroom.
Boone County Schools in Kentucky decided to have a little fun with a school closing announcement the other day by channeling the band Queen to inform parents the kids would stay home because of a storm.
The school superintendent figured if they got some exposure from their antics, people might donate money to the cash strapped school district. Hey, you gotta try, right?
Here's the video of the principal and an assistant recording the announcement for school district parents. Weird but fun.
Apparently, surfing on Lake Superior is big when it's below zero. Those are icicles around the guy's face. Not me, I'm staying inside in this cold weather.
I'm a lifelong Vermonter, yet I'm a cold weather wimp. And it's getting worse.
Don't get me wrong. There are things about winter that I like. To me, a beautiful day is one right after a powdery snowstorm and the sun comes out and the temperature gets up to 20 degrees.
Time to snowshoe!
However, we are coming out of a cold snap that proves my wimpiness.
We had an inch or two of new snow the other day, but the temperature remained well below zero. I usually clear new snow from the driveway first thing in the morning, but this time I waited until noon, when the sun was out and the temperature had climbed to minus 5.
And then I went right back inside to a warm house as soon as I finished the quick shoveling job.
I'm also still trying to hack away at the three or four inches of ice that has hermetically sealed my driveway and property since a pre-Christmas ice storm.
Today, the temperature got up to 15 degrees so I went to work outside. But the wind was gusting to 35 mph. The wind chill was too much. I went inside after just a half hour.
There they are in a video showing them enjoying the waves when the air temperature was 13 below zero. (Lake Superior is huge, so it takes a long time to freeze, even though it's subjected to repeated bouts of subzero weather starting in November)
The video shows people changing into their wet suits, nonchalantly standing barefoot in the snow. I also love the large icicles hanging off the surfers' wet suit head caps and framing their faces.
"It was minus 13 degrees F last weekend at Stoney Point. Big winds cranked the chill factor to -30F or lower, some estimate cite. The group wore thick wetsuits and surfed for hours between warm-ups in idling cars. Noted one of the surfers featured in the video here, "the water felt super warm by comparison at 38 degrees F."
Yep, in northern Minnesota, 38 degree water is warm.
By Sunday night and Monday, wind chills are forecast to sink to as low as 70 below near Lake Superior in what is being described as the strongest cold snap in decades to hit the region.
Somehow, I think the surfers will be out.
Meanwhile, here in Vermont, where the temperature is forecast to sink to a mild, boring 5 below, I think I'll stay inside.
Here's the video of the those crazy surfers in Lake Superior:
They tell us we might get some sleet and freezing rain mixed with the snow in Vermont tomorrow.
Ice storm damage in Hugo, Oklahoma, via @OKD2Houchen on Twitter.
That's part of a bad weather pattern that has spread frigid temperatures, snow and lots of ice across the country.
Apparently, it's bad in Russia, too. Watch what happens when workers try to remove huge icicles from a Russian building that were hanging like daggers over the pedestrians below.
Enjoying a pleasant, 49 degrees below zero morning in Manitoba, Canada.
It's worse in Canada, of course. It's always worse in Canada, given that's the country that exports all those nasty cold fronts to the United States.
Up in Manitoba, it was 45 below Celcius (49 below for us Fahrenheit fans. Since I get whiny when it gets to zero, I can't relate to that.
But, as Canadians do, the couple in the video below embrace the bitter cold. They go out, blow soap bubbles to see what happens, throw hot water in the air to make a steam display and have a grand old time.
Notice how they're dressed, or not dressed. The woman has no hat on. The man has no overcoat. Their glasses aren't even fogging up, for Chrissakes. And they seem like they are in no hurry to get back inside.
If I lived in their town, I would hibernate until May.
It must be their wonderful Canadian accents that keep them warm
So watch this delightful video that shows the coldest way to warm your heart.
I've come across two videos very recently that demonstrate that winter is out to kill us.
True, the people in both videos were out in the middle of nowhere, in rugged mountains, by people doing some pretty extreme, adventurous sports.
But the videos do want me to take a leisurely nap on a summer beach. (But not in the water! Stay away from the sharks!)
Happy spoiler alert: Everybody lived in the two videos you are about to see.
The first video shows some mountain climbers at someplace called Canale Holzer in Italy. It shows a big avalanche bearing down on them. I'm sure they got quite a scare:
The next video shows an ice climber who seems to have been attacked by an itty bitty chunk of ice falling off the mountain. That glorified ice cube set off a cascading set of problems.
The guy in question was wearing a GoPro camera, so we have the unfortunate ice climber's point of view as his ice climbing excursion goes seriously wrong:
As always, I have my trusty Canon Rebel camera with me in case something pretty unfolds in front of my face.
Skaters on a ice track carved into the snow on Lake Champlain
in North Hero, Vermont. That's Mount Mansfield in the distance
For some reason, winter isn't as great in my mind for photography as other seasons, but there's still a lot of beauty.
Last Sunday. a perfect Vermont February day, I stopped by a speedskating race on the frozen surface of Lake Champlain in North Hero, Vermont.
This evening, on the hill behind my house in St. Albans, Vermont, a lovely sunset help highlight the frozen Lake Champlain. If you click on the photos to make them bigger, you can just make out a pattern of little snow dunes on the ice covering the distant lake.
The little snow dunes make it look like the wind is stirring up waves, but the waves are completely still, that is until the spring thaw arrives.
Sunset as viewed from a hill in St. Albans, Vermont this evening.
That's Lake Champlain in front of the mountains.
Another view of this evening's sunset from a hill in St. Albans, Vermont.
I was at work early Sunday morning, and as I looked out the window the sun was rising and sparkling off frosty trees outside my office in Burlington, Vermont
Frosted trees near Battery Park, Burlington, Vt.
There had been a little fog overnight, and the temperature was in the single numbers. The fog froze to the trees. Steam rose from nearby Lake Champlain, which still hadn't really frozen since it's been a relatively warm winter.
The steam added to the frosty surroundings
With all this going on, I decided to take a break and go outside with my camera.
A walkway under frosted trees,
Battery Street, Burlington
I'm not crazy about winters, even mild ones, but the surroundings outside Sunday made me appreciate it a little more, despite the love/hate relationship I have with the season.
That's steam not ice on Lake Champlain. The dark sky
in the background is the fog that was frosting the trees
I'm a little bummed by the weather here in Vermont. It's been way below zero, windy and frigid.
Winter is so much work. It takes forever to get dressed in all those layers just to go outside, and even then it's uncomfortably cold. Being so bundled up feels so constricted, like I'm serving some sort of like a prison sentence. I want a jail break. Preferably to Belize or something.
But, when I start giving myself a pity party about hating winter, I watch videos like the one below, and I feet better. Because they are doing worse with winter than I am.
It seems like almost every storm that hits Vermont these days turns out worse than forecast.
Yesterday, they predicted high winds in Vermont, maybe gusting as high as 65 mph in a few isolated spots right along the western slopes of the Green Mountains.
Fierce winds in Vermont
yesterday snapped the top
off a spruce tree, which then
got hung up in powerlines.
Instead, winds roared over a much greater area of the state than forecast, slamming broad areas of Vermont, mostly in the western half of the state. They gusted to 73 mph in the town of Jericho in the northwest, and 70 mph in Pawlet, in the southwest.
The gales roared along Route 7, the main highway up the western side of the state. Near Middlebury, the wind knocked over a tractor trailer traveling along the road, precipitating a crash that killed a person.
The television news showed blown down barns, shingles flying from roofs, windows blown out, power lines hanging in a tangle of fallen trees. It's one disaster after another around here. Come to think of it, it's one disaster after another everywhere, isn't it.
I drove around in the storm, in some places worried that trees whipsawing back and forth would snap and fall on my truck. . Just as I got to Underhill, Vermont, the storm intensified, and trees and branches started falling.
The roar was loud, the truck was rocking. At one point, I stopped to remove a large branch from the road so I could continue. Finished with that task, I started to drive on. Looking in my rear view mirror, a tree slammed to the road right where my truck had been parked.
The tree wasn't big enough to have killed or seriously hurt me had it hit the truck, but it definitely would have caused some damage. Phew!
Here's one of the videos I took of the storm yesterday in Underhill Vermont:
Next, I parked near one of the most popular sledding hills in Vermont. A little snow was mixed with the rain at this point, but in that kind of wind, there was no tobogganing in this storm, as you can see in the next vid:
The wind was picking up even more, so I decided to get out of dodge. But I stopped down the road for just one more video. The rain made it all seem that much more dramatic:
I know, I know, you can't point at one storm and scream Global Warming. And we've had storms this bad before. But the unsettling thing is the storms, or the odd weather, the strange heat waves, the relative lack of cold waves, the wind that seems to always roar, the floods, the long dry spells, it's definitely not the weather I had when I was growing up in Vermont
If the disasters keep coming, and getting more frequent, not just here in Vermont but everywhere, when will it start to really affect our lives. Obviously it already affects the lives whose property was damaged.
But what about people like me, and the vast majority of us who suffered no real property damage in Fridays storm? Luckily for me, of the dozens of severe storms, winds, or floods that caused damage in Vermont over the past five or six years, only perhaps three caused very minor damage to my property. So minor that in each case I spent less than $50 fixing the problem and was able to make repairs on my own.
A weak tornado hit my house in 2008 eight months after I bought it. That storm blew out a window, tore a few shingles from my roof, removed part of a flimsier roof over my deck, and I still haven't found one of the deck chairs that went flying.
Two flash floods in the spring of 2011 caused a bit of damage to my driveway and some of my gardens, but didn't touch the house. It seems like I'm always out in the yard, cleaning up more branches from yet another storm.
The wind yesterday wasn't nearly as powerful at my house as elsewhere in the state. The electricity stayed on here, and only a few small branches litter my lawn. I escaped unscathed again.
But even if I keep avoiding direct effects from a parade of disaster, will I pay the price in higher food costs as droughts and floods take their toll elsewhere. Will the nation eventually deal with unrest or refugees somewhere in the world because the weather got too extreme for them to live where they were?
Will we get disaster fatigue? Every time I turn around, the weather somewhere in the nation kills people and destroys houses. I know that's always been the case. But if the disasters get bigger, more people die, more property gets flattened, how will we react?
Yes, as a weather geek, I got my share of excitement watching the wind dramatically rock the trees yesterday. And as is often the case, even the worst weather has beauty. During yesterday's storms, the cloud briefly parted to reveal some gorgeous rainbows.
During yesterday's big storm in Vermont, the skies cleared for a bit, revealing rainbows, even as trees continued leaning in the wind.
The storm is still around here in Vermont his Saturday. The wind is calmer but still gusty, and as I look out my window, I see that it's gotten colder, it's snowing and a dark cloud that forecasters say contains a very heavy snow squall looms just to my west. It's headed right toward me. More weather excitement. I like that.
A snow squall is just part of winter. Occasional destructive storms are just part of life. Let's just hope a constant parade of devastating storms and weather extremes don't become part of life. Or death.
Here in northern Vermont yesterday, we had a typical late November morning. It was chilly, it snowed a little bit, and the roads got kind of icy.
This shouldn't be a big deal, but we've come to a point at which a critical mass of people have become too stupid to drive in the snow. Gridlock resulted. Over just an inch of snow. What is this, Atlanta?
A wet road, a snow flurry, and people panicked
themselves into this gridlock.
I'm willing to give a few people a pass. You can't afford snow tires? Well, OK, just do the best you can. Just moved to Vermont and you haven't figured out how to drive in the snow? OK, you'll learn. But these types should only be in a tiny minority.
How do you explain the fact that enough people sped, spun and twirled their way on the roads to gum up the works completely. Most of these people have lived in Vermont for years. You haven't realized yet that winter happens here?
It's been getting worse here, year after year with incompetent winter drivers. I wonder what happened? Did common sense go out the window? Did Congress pass a law in which we now must go 30 mph over the speed limit on glare ice while texting, putting on makeup, drinking coffee and eating Dunkin Donuts?
Because it seems that's what everybody is doing.
Well, actually, I'd imagine most people out there are still OK at driving in winter. Which means the dumb ones made thousands of us late for work, irritated, and broke, since we burned off tankfulls of gasoline just crawling along out there on the highway.
It's becoming an embarrassment, this winter incompetence. We Vermonters had a reputation as winter ready and tough, ready for any kind of cold season blast. I remember about two decades ago, a blizzard billed as "storm of the century" was considered "storm of the weekend" here in Vermont.
Now, we wilt like a petunia in Minsk in January at the first sign of a snow flurry. It's sad.
I know I'm going to be painted as a hypocrite when people read this, since it also has a brief video I took of the gridlock on a wet, non icy highway amid light, inconsequential snow flurries. But in my defense, the traffic was moving more slowly than the pace at which I usually walk, and I kept a big distance between my truck and the car in front of me.
Here's the vid:
It's going to be a long winter. Now I know when it snows, even if it's just the lightest flurry, I have to leave for work two hours before I'd normally need to because Dumb Winter Driver will spin out on the Interstate, clueless as to why going 100 mph through a snow squall is a bad idea. (Somebody in central Vermont actually did this Saturday, and was cited into court for reckless driving. Duh.)
Please, Dumb Winter Drivers: Don't drive all winter. Just hibernate. Or move to Florida. Please. We won't miss you. Trust us.
We have a couple of flurries going on outside now. It's snowing at a rate of about three snowflakes per hour. Which means people will panic, and it'll take me three hours to get home tonight, a trip that normally takes a half hour. Sigh.
Here's a strange little video making the viral rounds on this here Internet thingamajig.
It's great to skate around on the (mostly) smooth ice of a frozen lake in the middle of winter. This guy, apparently fueled by LOTS of vodka, cavorts on the lake, and in the lake, with props including underwater cameras, and a chainsaw. He doesn't look cold, though I surely would be if I was crazy as this guy:
It hasn't been a tough winter here at all in Vermont, but still, it's not my favorite season, and as always as we reach the season's midpoint, I'm craving green leaves.
I found myself over the weekend staring at the sun streaming through the windows of my St. Albans, Vermont house, lighting up the house plants.
I took some pictures, just so I can stare at them on the gloomy days of late January and February. As an added treat, at least I got a decent sunset sky toward the end of the day Sunday.
