Avoiding the dreaded polar vortex

Now that climate change is upon us I’m trying to pay closer attention to the weather. I don’t want to get caught in a polar vortex unprepared.

To that end I spend an awful lot of time staring at the television, anxiously awaiting the Weather Channel’s Local on the Eights. I care little what’s happening elsewhere. I simply want the skinny on wherever I am.

However, as a creature of habit, I remain a bit unnerved by the weather network’s change in the local forecast. Jim Cantori now tells me what to expect in an recorded announcement that doesn’t even require me to watch the screen.

But even passed out in a drunken stupor, I always open at least one eye to catch the radar map that wraps up the forecast. I want to see what’s coming and who’s going to get it next.

Before the change in format, the map used to include only the larger towns in my part of the state -- Malta, Havre, Glasgow, Lewistown. Then an automated Cantori took over the narration and the map changed to include Christina and Benzien.

I like to think I’m pretty well acquainted with my adopted state from one end to the other, but Christina and Benzien? I was baffled.

Being the modern New Age guy I am, I turned to all-knowing Google, but instead of finding out where Christina, Montana was located, I was invited to befriend her on Facebook.

And while she looked pretty hot, I passed on the invite. Technology had failed me once again.

Going old school, I pulled Roberta Carkeek Cheney’s wonderful book Names on the Face of Montana, off the shelf and looked up both Christina and Benzien.

Christina is in Fergus County north of Lewistown, a “prosperous farm and ranch community” that hit its peak, according to Cheney, in 1915.

Benzien is even more obscure. Located in Garfield County, it is now a ghost town of only a couple of buildings. Benzien though, in 1916, boasted of having two newspapers.

Maybe it’s that media connection that prompted the Weather Channel to include Benzien on my Local on the Eights radar map. Christina, I suppose was included simply because of her hot Facebook photo. It’s a bit disturbing that the same folks that brought us the polar vortex and named winter storms feature ghost towns on their weather map.

I suppose the next time I’m in Benzien, however, looking for a newspaper in which to wrap my fish, I may feel differently. I sure don’t want to get caught in a polar vortex unprepared.

Parker Heinlein is at [email protected]