Хүйтэн болсон шүү

My gate through the seasons...

...late August...

...mid October...

...and mid November

During the summer it was so hot that it remined me of SoCal, and one would be inclined to doubt the persistent rumors of winter’s severity. The only exceptions were rainy days, when we would get strong winds from the north and east and the temperature would drop as much as 20 degrees. I remember a few nights sitting in my second-story room with only my underwear on at 10:00 waiting to cool off enough to fall asleep. But slowly, things began to change.

September dawned warm and bright, different from August only in that the heat was pleasant rather than uncomfortable. The first sign was on September 7, when I got up to do my business in the middle of the night and noticed there was a thin layer of ice on the handle of the outhouse door. Sure enough, in the morning the dew that normally accumulates on grass had frozen. We would continue to get frost most mornings for a while. At the same time the grass began dying and turned brown. When the greyish blue frost covered it though, it would produce an attractive contrast of silver and gold, replacing the thick green we’d acquired by the end of the August rains.

Frost on lumber

Frost on the ground

Frost on grass

On September 10, my hashaa people decided to start “winterizing” my ger. Looking at the blazing sun, I questioned whether this was necessary. We worked up a sweat too. Mongolians have a subconscious awareness of these things though, because two days later came the second sign of the Arctic apocalypse. On September 12, it snowed. By September 14 it had started melting, and it was all gone within a week.

Nights would be cold, but the days would be sunny and fairly warm. The mornings, of course, would be cold, but once you opened the ger flap, or walked outside, the sun would be there to crown you with warmth. As soon as the sun set it would get cold quickly. But the days were nearly ideal, probably hovering in the 70s. There wasn’t too much wind. In California I was sick and tired of the sun because every time it came out I knew it would be another hot, sweaty, yucky summer day. But now when the sun smiled at me, I smiled back. This lasted until well into October.

Nothing very dramatic happened, but the Earth was ever so slowly tilting and working changes across the land. The sunset declined to about 5:45, or about 4 ½ hours earlier than its peak in June. Similarly, the sunrise rose from about 4 AM to 7:30 AM. The angle of the sun also declined, and the light cast into my ger through the roof climbed up the wall. I got good at starting fires, then began to build fires every night. Insects faded out of consciousness. Snow fell again on Sept. 27, and again persisted in patches for about a week. For a minute things went backwards and on Oct. 10 and 11 we got rain. But it snowed yet again on Oct. 21.

While the temperature had been freezing or below at night for over a month, about this time, it began to shift below that point in the daylight as well. Winter began to lose its novelty and became more annoying.

The Oct. 21 snow that was in the permanent shadows on the north side of buildings never melted.



Snow can be melted and boiled to supplement your well water.

 On Oct. 22 I hung clothes up to dry outside. At 5:30 when the sun began to set, my shirt wasn’t dry. It had begun to stiffen.

Around Halloween I started to have trouble keeping my feet warm at night. I would wake up in the night with uncomfortably cold feet. This stopped after I started sleeping with my Peace Corps-issued sleeping bag under the covers.

On Nov. 3, I noticed that I could see my breath at 1:25 PM while walking outside on a bright day. By this point, I was making a fire in the morning and at night, and sometimes in the evening. I started thinking about getting thermometers for inside and outside my ger.

On Nov. 8 I left the cat’s water bowl outside in the afternoon. When I brought it back inside at 7:20, almost 2 hours after sunset, there was a layer of ice on top which was thin enough to penetrate with my index finger.

On Nov. 10, 2 hours after improving my ping, snow began to fall.

On Nov. 16, after 5 days in the aimag center, I returned home at night to find thick ice in my water container and water filter, which I would slowly thaw over the next day. It snowed that day, and none of the snow has melted, except on the edges of metal roofs that face the sun.

Layer of ice in my water container

Clothes hung out to dry "steam" just like your breath.

On Nov. 17, I boiled some water at night my water-boiler-thingy (looks like a coffee carafe). On Nov. 18, I awoke to find slush forming in that boiler. I put my tumpen outside, and about 3 hours later, in the middle of the day, the water left in it had frozen. While chopping wood in the afternoon, mucus inside my nose froze and frost formed on my mustache. The cat’s water bowl froze, this time inside the ger. Since that day, any shallow standing water inside my ger turns to slush or thin ice overnight.

On Nov. 22, I discovered that by morning my arm had gotten cold through two shirts, two blankets, and a quilt. My legs were fine, because I left my winter coat at the foot of my bed. Time to put more stuff on my bed.

In the process, I have discovered that unlike rain, which dripped from the edges of my ger, snow drips from the center, because it accumulates most on the top, then I discovered that it doesn’t matter, because the snow never melts anymore unless it’s right next to the chimney. My wood gets delivered to me as whole trunks, and if I saw and chop one of them up, it can suffice to heat my ger for 5 days. The current signal for when I should build another fire is when I can see my breath inside my ger. I went from wearing a thermal underwear under my pants to wearing thermal underwear plus my pajamas under my pants. Mongolians have also told me that “It doesn’t get really cold until the end of December.” So, I’d better do some winter shopping! First things on my list are felt-lined pants and another quilt.

The snow still looks awfully pretty though.