Originally published in the Grand Rapids Business Journal, January 26, 2004.

I attended college at Michigan Tech in Houghton, Michigan, which is located at the very north of our Upper Peninsula on a spit of land that juts bravely (if unreasonably) into the icy waters of Lake Superior. Click here for a Mapquest link.

Even if you know where it is, go ahead and take a look. I belabor the geography to impress upon you, kind reader, of the nearly year-round winter-like conditions, but in particular the months of January and February in which, as the great Garrison Keillor once described his neighboring (and mostly south of Houghton) Minnesota, nature tries its level best to kill you.

I graduated with a decent education, a world-class collection of flannel shirts, and more than my fair share of stories about snow. Here's one of them:

My senior year I lived in a big ol' house on Ruby Street near campus. At any given time, there were about 17 people living there, depending on the boyfriend/girlfriend situations and how the tarty girl on the second floor was doing with the hockey team. The house was three full stories, and I had the smallest room on the top floor -- 8x8 feet with a notch taken out from where the chimney passed through. In the dead of winter, it was unbearably hot. I often had to leave a window open. You see, the thermostat was in a hallway near the back entrance. The outside door was not very good at keeping the wind out nor did it latch well, so it often blew open. The net result was that heat was perpetually pumping through the roof of this 100 year-old sieve and melting the ample snow.

The first floor was a separate flat, so on a daily basis I had to take (and keep shoveled) the outside path around the house to retrieve my beloved Milwaukee Journal. I believe I was first to notice the frozen waterfall. It was an icicle that formed off the roof and reached the ground. It had grown so fast that it was too dangerous to try to remove it. Every day I passed, every day it grew, and I every day I prayed it wouldn't fall over on me.

One night, shortly after I had returned home via the path, there was the loud noise of a jet landing and then a loud noise of a jet crashing. The waterfall had pulled away from the house (taking a sizeable chunk of the roof with it) and landed right across the path. It was six feet in diameter. It took me a couple of hours with an ax to open the path enough for me to step through.

What brought all this on? Well, it's been a bitter, snowy winter thus far in this part of Michigan, and the Grand Rapids Chamber of Commerce recently announced a report on how their latest tourist campaign is going. Apparently, it has done well. They've been touting the area as "Michigan's West Coast" and playing up the nearby Lake Michigan beaches, which is all fine and truthful but extremely hard to fathom at the moment.

When it comes to tourism, nobody mentions the sunless days, the endless snow, the breath-snatching wind chills. Nor should they, I suppose. But for those of us who live here, we've got to endure it, and -- if we have any chance of making it though -- we should embrace it, too. Perhaps by swapping snow stories. Have any good stories about how Winter has attempted to take you out? Send 'em to me! I'd love to read them -- got nothin' else to do, really. We're all just sitting here inside trying to stay warm.