New to town? Here’s everything you need to know!
My qualifications: I moved here even though I hate winter and crave sunlight. I have successfully not gone fully mad for more than 25 years.
Coping with Duluth winters is a big adjustment if you are from almost anywhere else. People move here thinking, “I like a place with all four seasons,” and then their spirits break on the anvil of winter. There are only two seasons here: winter and summer. Summer is slow to arrive and quick to leave. The part where the city is soggy like a wet diaper for two months is called spring, but it’s just winter and summer overlapping. There will be snow on the ground in April, maybe just in shaded areas but it will be there, if it’s not still actively falling, which it may be. Fall is fine if you like that sort of thing, but really it’s just summer dying, and winter being born. This can be a devastating realization. After a particularly brief, cool summer, when you were really hoping for a long, hot one, the sight of the first red leaf in mid-August feels like a knife in the guts. Here’s what I’ve learned about coping with Duluth weather — mostly winter, but other seasons can suck too.
Let me first mention that I am not on anti-depressants, although I definitely should be. I gave it strong consideration for years and if they’re right for you, go for it. They’re saving some people’s lives. Other people are always trying to quit them and fiddling with their prescriptions. Who has the time? Me, after burning through several therapists who all sounded alike, I had a flash of insight: as long as I’m hopelessly super depressed and dysfunctional, maybe I should dig a crawlspace under my all-time low and sort of, you know, make it cozy in there? Also, have you heard of beer and pot? They work great if you haven’t tried them. Try to do normal “hygge” stuff too, like saunas, outdoor recreation, and Netflix.
But the big tips I want to mention are:
Step one: Uncouple your mood from the weather, to the greatest extent possible.
This took me two decades to get the hang of, but it can be done. Duluth is going to give you some ass weather. Conversely, when it’s nice, it’s God’s country. But if you let Duluth’s ass weather get to you, you’re effed. It’s a bad place to be sensitive to gray days and one of the coldest, longest winters anywhere in the country, the world even. Duluth weather in February — when winter is more than half over! — may be compared to the ice moons of Jupiter. So, welcome to town, buckle up, get ahold of yourself, and appreciate the city for what it is besides the weather.
Since we’re so far north, the path of the sun weaves dramatically across the sky as the seasons progress. You can almost feel the wobble of the globe. Don’t let it dizzy you or give you motion sickness. The planet is giving you an extreme and long winter, and short summers of varying quality. It’s not personal.
Step two: Dark days strategies.
To deal with months of dark days, I have used two distinct strategies over time:
Dark Day Strategy #1: Chase the light.
My first several years here, I spent winters with all the lights on in the house, with full-spectrum bulbs. I love full-spectrum bulbs, they are like little suns. They work, like how a vitamin D supplement can make you feel like you spent a day at the beach. Do not overdose on vitamin D. Maybe ask a doctor and everything. For me, full spectrum bulbs and/or vitamin D can get my pituitary gland or whatever talking to my theta waves again. You know what I mean. But these interventions are an expense, and I tired of keeping myself in fresh bulbs year after year. For a while I prioritized having just one full-spectrum bulb in a place I spent the most time. But my use of them pinched off. Keeping all the lights on in winter started to feel desperate and sad, like the Northern Exposure episode where someone gets addicted to full-spectrum light and needs an intervention. After a few years of normal bulbs I realized I had adjusted. I had even forgotten about my vitamin D and let it expire. Was I still depressed? Yes.
Dark Day Strategy #2: Become the dark.
This is a more advanced technique. But I use it exclusively now. I experimented with embracing the fact that night falls in the mid-afternoon. It went great. Here’s what I did: installed rope lights in the house as to only give indirect light, i.e. around the base of the walls behind stuff. Then, I leave all the other lights off. I turn on overhead lights or lamps for specific tasks like reading a book or making food. But otherwise I quit worrying and learned to love months of long nights. In the lowest light possible, I am calm, slo-mo. Listen to a lot of Mazzy Star. Watch Ad Astra and get in the zone; the long liminal sequence of his months-long solo voyage to Neptune is exactly what winter in Duluth is like. My lizard brain engages in a way that feels at home in deep time and doesn’t worry about anything on less than a geological timescale. Every now and then I’ll go to bed at 8 p.m. if I feel like it, and get some serious dreaming done. After year one of my Become the Darkness plan, I was unsettled when the days started getting longer again. Around March I was recoiling like a vampire from the light. That’s when I knew I had switched polarity. I used to love the light returning. Now it is almost an irritant. Summer is still my favorite season. But I look forward to deep winter in a way I couldn’t imagine just a few years ago.
Step three: Overdress, in layers.
You don’t need special winter gear or clothing if you just stay serious about being warm and dress in layers. It is preferable to carry a coat you don’t need than to be caught in the cold without one. Keep abreast of the weather and bring an extra layer just in case the lake starts getting surly. Icy breezes can whip up out of nowhere even in summer. Complacency is your enemy, especially in winter. You may start to think, hell, even in negative temps I am fine without a hat or gloves because I’m just going from the house to the car, or I’m just dashing to the store and back. But don’t be a hero. It’s all well and good to insist you don’t need a hat. But the one time you get stuck outside or encounter an unexpected delay, you will be so miserable you will never go hatless again. Anticipate.
Step four: Winterize.
If you own your home, get a smoke test. I thought I had done everything to prevent drafts until a smoke test opened my eyes. Leon from Better World Builders took me around my house with a burning taper, holding it next to windows and walls and doors, and where the smoke starts wiggling you have cold air getting in from outside. Once that was done, I knew everywhere I had to caulk and use expanding spray foam, from the top floor down to the basement. My house has been dramatically more comfortable ever since; that smoke test was the single most effective weatherproofing step I ever took. Absent that, plastic wrap kits for sealing your windows, or otherwise keeping windows caulked and weatherstripped, is your friend. If you are getting new windows installed, ask the contractors about how the spaces in between the window and the window frame are being filled — an energy-efficient window carelessly installed can be useless. Install draft guards on your doors. After all this, you will still be wearing a hat inside for six months even with the heat on. But it will be noticeably better.
Advice I heard one time about heating the house: People want and need to save money by heating their homes as little as possible. But setting the thermostat one or two degrees warmer isn’t that much more expensive, and it may make a correspondingly oversized difference in your comfort level.
Also it’s boring but bleed your radiators and have the furnace regularly maintenanced. I heard a horror story once of an old Duluth couple who suffered in a cold house for twenty years because they didn’t know about bleeding their radiators. They grew to think a cold house with barely working heat was a normal thing. Once they had it done — it’s easy, I have a radiator key on my keychain — they were warm enough for the first time in forever. I myself developed an issue over a few years where my furnace struggled, but because the problem developed so gradually, I started rationalizing being cold, and making up fan theories about what the problem was. Then I called a guy who fixed it. My comfort level before and after was like night and day. And the issue was not what I thought it was at all. Don’t suffer more than you have to.
Step five: Drivers need 360-degree visibility to be safe on the road.
If you are driving, in winter, without removing snow from all of your car windows, please move back to Iowa before you hurt someone.
Step six: Tune out local haters.
Just a good rule of thumb for mental health. Adjust your expectations to the following and you will be much happier:
One: The frost-heave cycle chews up roads as a fact of life, creating potholes even if street repair is going gangbusters. Potholes are not personal insults to you signed by the mayor.
Two: The mayor of Duluth cannot solve international crises like opioid addiction, or normal problems of cities like homelessness. If someone is trying to convince you that Duluth specifically is an urban hellhole, they may be huffing their own farts. I’ve lived in big cities and rural areas, and Duluth has the best of both, seems to me. I’ve always been a Hillsider and I’ve always loved downtown. Duluth’s problems are no different than anywhere else. If this is too big and scary of a city for you, move to Hibbing. Related, if someone tries to convince you the Duluth music scene sucks, invite them to move to Rochester to enjoy that larger city’s total music scene of three cover bands and two venues.
Frequently Asked Question: What is the best bloody mary in town? A: Pizza Lucé’s weekend brunch build-your-own bloody. Keyword: Blue cheese stuffed olives.
Hopefully those tips and pointers yield dividends for you. Welcome!