A friend of mine asked me if the recent cold snap reminded me of the 22 years I spent working in the high north. My answer was simple. “Not really, but it still sucks.”

What’s happening around here is not even close to being “seriously frigid.” 

“Seriously frigid” is a cold so mean that, if you aren’t careful jumping into your rig, your long johns shatter. It’s so cold that new flashlight batteries last about three and a half seconds, candle flames freeze and diesel fuel becomes so thick that it’s sold by the brick.

I remember a nasty space of time back in 1989 when I was messing around between Prospect Creek and the Yukon River. The ambient temperature down at an old well house was so righteously wicked that its thermometer was bottomed out at minus 75.

You could throw coffee in the air and it would hit the ground as crystals. That was kinda of cool, ’cause if you wanted to reuse the brew all you had to do was scoop up the flakes and re-heat them. Again, it wasn’t all that bad, unless the dreaded “bit of a breeze” came up resulting in a wind chill that would take you down like a toilet with a 10-gallon flush cycle.

Luckily, when it’s that cold, the air is so frosty that even it can’t move. The major danger is working near someone. If they sneeze, you could lose an ear.

You think I’m kidding about the wind chill factor don’t cha? Well, my idiot dog Howard once barked at a semi when it roared passed at only 60 below and the back blast froze Howard so solid that I had to take him out for a drag when he needed to relieve himself. Our deranged-pet specialist claimed that I had thawed out Howard properly and that he had sustained no brain damage. How could he tell? I sure as hell can’t. His behavior has always been just north of brain dead.

Anyway, I thought that I had left all of those freezer burn conditions behind when I came home to write and fish instead of feeling my blood congeal every winter.

Obviously I was way wrong.

Eagles are crashing in my front yard because they keep forgetting to de-ice their wings, moose are so cold that they’re backing their butts up to our Monitor’s exhaust to try and warm up and blocks of ice bobbing in Mud Bay are so huge that they could serve as the airport’s alternate runway.

What’s up with this? I've put so many trees through our back-up woodstove in the last eight days that I’m considering flagging down logging trucks for direct delivery just so I can cut out the middle man.

If this acute cool stays around much longer, I’ll use up more timber than it took to build Al Gore’s mansion. We’re talking about the destruction of an entire national forest system here.

I have one final snivel about this less-than-warm atmosphere. It’s keeping way too many people indoors, way too much.  I’m starting to overhear glaze-eyed cretins discussing who was on The View and Judge Judy shows while waiting in check-out lines. That’s scary.

What’s even more ludicrous is the fact that some people are starting to swallow early political rhetoric about opposing 2008 presidential candidates from spokesmen who have as much credibility as The World Federation of Wrestling. Elaborate pontificating, denials, lurid accusations, risqué confessions, lies, deceits, arguments and all-around behavior that would make the reporters at the National Inquirer blush.

And that’s just the Hillary campaign. It’s getting harder and harder to distinguish some of our politicians from those fine citizens on the Jerry Springer Show of Sludge.

I, on the other hand, remain unaffected throughout this cold snap by the droll offerings on the tube.

Gotta go now. Once I finish my blueberry and sea urchin dip that I learned how to make on Martha Stewart’s new “Recipes for Parolees” show and check the QVC channel for a sale on 300-inch plasma TVs, I’m heading to town. My wife has me set up to see a “special” doctor. Don’t know exactly why. I think it might be a neurologist.

He is the type of dude that does urine samples ... isn’t he?

When he’s not dodging the cold, Nick can be reached at NCVarney@gmail.com.