The Winchell Factor, and Whisky – Zero – Zero – Lima

In the aviation business, all pilots, dispatchers, maintenance engineers and flight attendants are obliged to take part in an annual training program called CRM, for Crew Resource Management.  I just completed mine again this month. Interesting in year one — but this is year five! Same modules. Thank goodness for that little widget that allows one to double the playback speed of an online lecture. Makes Alvin the Chipmunk sound like a laid back surfer dude. These oft-stultifying refreshers, covering topics like Decision Making, Threat and Error Management, Stress, and the SHEL model are useful, and helpful, but year by year they get drier than a popcorn fart. Every time around, though, I have to admit that something new sticks with me. I guess that’s the point.

This year, it was in the sub-module about Stress, and the tidbit I took away was that one of the warning signs with the onset of stress is the loss of one’s sense of humor. (Or humour.  Depends where you live.) I just tuned in, as we do, to the BBC World News. Oh, man. Maybe, about now, a dose of humor is in order. Here goes:

Been cold where you live? It’s been a cold January in Scandinavia, cold in many parts of North America, even cold down in Jackson, Mississippi, from what I gather. A good old-fashioned blast of winter. The weather reports are full of sullen voices announcing a “risk of frostbite,” to go along with the pantheon of modern-day Weather Warnings and Color-Coded Alerts to which we are all subjected, admonishing us as to the myriad hazards lurking out of doors.

In summer nowadays, day after day, it’s all about the Humidex, or the Heat Index, or the UV Index, or the Air Quality Index. And no longer do we have plain unsexy Warm Fronts, Cold Fronts, Highs and Lows.  Now the atmosphere keeps delivering Polar Vortices, Atmospheric Rivers, and Heat Domes. I’m convinced that someone, somewhere, is thinking up another warning or newfangled description at this very moment. Find this person, please. Gag them.

The grand-daddy of all of these is the ever-popular Winchell Factor, which for years has almost always been mispronounced, and even mis-typed, as “Wind Chill Factor.”

It was 1962, a windy cold January dusk, when Ernie (Ernest) Winchell, 59, a high school physics teacher from Bowbells North Dakota, nearly froze to death. Ernie’s Pontiac Tempest, his pride and joy, had broken down and he was suddenly alone on the prairie south of Flaxton, homeward bound after a visit with his Canadian in-laws up in Weyburn Saskatchewan. The Tempest had a three-on-the-tree manual transmission, and Ernie had been having some trouble with it. That evening, with a tortured mashing of gears, Ernie and his Tempest ground to a halt.

Ernie had set off from home two days earlier, in a rush after classes, because his brother-in-law had fallen seriously ill. That had been during one of the mild spells that sometimes come to the northern plains even in late January, and as the transmission seized up Ernie realized that he did not have much on board in the way of warm clothing. Off in the distance, a mile and a half at most, he could just make out the ninety-watt porch light of a house on the outskirts of Flaxton.

Hatless, gloveless, and with just a nylon windbreaker over a cotton work shirt, Ernie set off, earnestly, on foot. From his line of work, he knew more about physics and thermodynamics than most people, but he was confident, and male, and 59.  It was only about 10 below zero, Celsius, but Ernie was not Celsian — and in those days neither was Canada — so it was really 15 degrees above zero, Americano.  Not bitterly cold, not for January in western North Dakota, but the prairie breeze was whistling straight out of Alberta at a solid 20 miles an hour (remember miles?)

It was a very close call. By the time Ernie arrived at the doorstep of Edith and Martin Tollefson, he was nearly done for.  His speech was slurred, he had lost the use of his hands, and he had passed through the shivering stage of chilling to the point where he was convinced he was getting warmer. Hypothermia training courses call this phase “paradoxical undressing.” Ernie was right there, and he had started fumbling to unzip his windbreaker.  In short, had that nearest porch light been even half a mile farther down the road, it would have been nighty-night on the side of the road for Ernie Winchell, just a steady slide into the deep sleep of hypothermia.

Martin was at the curling rink in town that evening, but happily, Edith Tollefson had seen some very cold men in her life. She took Ernie in, put on the kettle, got down the brandy, and propped Mr. Winchell up close to the woodburner. Ernie revived, phoned his wife, and arranged to get the Tempest towed in to Bowbells. The next day, he resolved that he would make it his mission in life to educate people about the amazing double-whammy heat-loss knockout punch of wind combined with cold. The rest, right through to widespread mispronunciation, is history. He began writing articles, appearing on radio and television, and lecturing at the U in Grand Forks. The Winchell Factor was born.

Within fifteen years of Ernie’s near-death experience, Winchell Factors started to appear in weather broadcasts. Sadly, there was confusion over the derivation of the term, and it quickly became common to hear it pronounced Wind Chill.  Ernie Winchell was an old man by then, and he was Swedish Lutheran, so he did not make a fuss over this confusion with his namesake Factor. He did live to see his quest steadily gaining ground.  He passed away in his sleep in 1983, snuggled up next to a warm Mrs. Winchell in their warm bed at the Bowbells Senior Residence.

Okay, I made all that up.  Shamelessly imitating my dear friend Dave Barry. (Okay, I made that up too.)

Still, it really is the wind, in winter, isn’t it?  Moving cold air is a force to be reckoned with. It comes at you, feinting and ducking and sliding in, jabbing and poking and turning bits and pieces of your face and ears and fingers dead and white. Winchell factor, folks.  Ernie knew.

Calm air, by contrast, even at forty or fifty below zero, is more like a ghostly presence than a raving, murderous adversary. Walking around in calm deep cold, pushing clouds of breath ahead of you, swaddled in layers of puffy clothing, you feel like an astronaut on a spacewalk. You sense the bite of the cold, and you know instinctively that you must not get the least bit wet, and you must not fall down and lie inert, and you must keep plodding forward to that next warm place, wherever it may be.     

Sadly, people do confuse the Winchell Factor with the temperature. The shrill Cassandra tone of the weather broadcasters plays a part in this. For nerds like me this can be frustrating. Say it is minus ten (pick your flavor, C. or F.) but the Winchell is sitting at minus 35 because of a stiff breeze.  If your car will always start at minus ten, then hey, relax, your car will start. The temperature is minus ten, not minus 35. Your beloved lump of Ford or Nissan only knows that it is minus ten.  Yes, because of that wind, it will cool right off to minus ten pretty quickly once you park – just as quickly as it would on a calm day at minus 35.  That’s the Winchell Factor. Bless you, Ernie.

One more note here before I go – a tangent that made me chuckle. One day a few years ago I heard a pilot call another pilot on 126.7, the air traffic frequency in Canada.  “Are you inbound for Kirk Lake?” “No, we are going to Cook Lake. Charlie Zero Zero Kilo.” It made me laugh because it was classic pilot talk – spelling by number. All that was missing were a few acronyms.

When I was out on snowshoes the other day, in deep cold, seeking the moose that had made the snowy tracks I was trying to follow, I worked up a frightful lather of perspiration. (Yes, I know better, but yes, it still happens.) But I relaxed when I reviewed what I was wearing.  No less than four layers of wool on my upper body, two on my feet, three on my legs. Wool t-shirt, wool union suit, wool shirt, and wool sweater. Wool mukluk liners, wool socks, wool long johns X 2, and wool pants. Wool balaclava, under wool hat. I was not invincible, but I had — to quote my pilot friend — Whisky – Zero – Zero –Lima  on my side. Wool – not goose down, not Polarfleece, and for sure not Gore Tex – WOOL is our ultimate weapon in the January fight against interstellar cold. Layers and layers of wool, warm when wet, no bells or whistles or chemical compounds.  The finely spun fur of sheep, who – bonus! – did not even need to die to give us naked apes this wonderful weapon in the fight against cold.

My warm bed calls, and I will ramble off. As Mr. Winchell’s factor grips you in the days ahead, find yourself some Whisky – Zero – Zero – Lima and layer it on. Den you be happy mahn, as Bob Marley would say.  And hey – try your best to keep your sense of humor / humour. We lose that, we all be hooped.