Don’t bet on a South Dakota spring

“South Dakota? You know it gets cold there, right?”

This is what more than a few people back home said to me when they heard I was coming to school here. At the time, I thought it was pretty stupid. The only difference between the weather here and in Illinois was that Illinois got it a day or two later.

Now that I’ve lived here for a few years, I still think it’s a stupid question. It gets cold here and then some.

Spring on the plains is a numbers game. How many layers should I wear? How much will the temperature change in 12 hours? How many seconds do I wait at the crosswalk in the sleet before I try my luck against oncoming traffic? I’m always checking the Weather Channel app on my phone, but even with modern technology it’s a challenge to stay one step ahead of mother nature. I, like plenty of other people, strolled to the library last Monday under sunny 70 degree skies. A few hours later, I shivered my way back home under foreboding clouds and against 35 degree winds. That same day, Brookings was under a blizzard and tornado warning at the same time.

As I write this, snowflakes the size of marshmallows are falling while robins chirp indignantly outside my window. I’d almost be willing to bet five bucks that the snow will be totally gone by the time this column is published. Then again, with my luck, we’d get another six inches and I’d owe all my readers a combined total of $10.

In any case, a South Dakota spring is the true yearly reckoning. Everyone knows what to expect from a plains winter. I scoff when I hear schools back home cancel class and the windchill is less than 25 below zero. No, the true test is psychological: How long can you handle the hour-to-hour unpredictability when everything including your calendar says things should be better by now? Arguably, this is a valuable life skill.

If you think about it, things aren’t so terrible. We’ve already earned the right to the “Back in my day…” stories about walking across campus and back in any weather imaginable. And even thought the weather is more of the November variety, when the semester ends in just a few weeks you’ll wonder how the time passed so quickly.

This is South Dakota. It gets cold here. But it also gets sweltering hot. I just wouldn’t bet on that happening any time soon.

Vermillion’s Forecast