Yahoo Autos Winter-Testing Cars Is an Isolated Life that Quickly Gets Weird
The worst part isn't the cold-although it's plenty cold in Baudette, Minnesota, a stone's throw from the Canadian border. During the month of January, the average low is minus 7 degrees Fahrenheit, and the thermometer makes regular dives to 30 below. It's so cold that people don't turn their cars off when running errands for fear they won't restart. And in the seconds it takes to dash inside the grocery store, the cold pierces your many layers of clothing so quickly that it's almost as if you're wearing nothing at all. Your face will start to hurt-not just tingle with the cold but actually hurt. You get the real sense that if the power goes out, we'd all die, and quickly.
Baudette is also extremely remote: In the amount of time it takes to travel there from Detroit-two flights, plus a couple-hour drive-you could be wandering the streets of Amsterdam. The town is home to 1100 hearty souls, a 40-foot-long statue of a walleye, and not much else, aside from megasupplier Bosch's winter test facility. This is where engineers while away the winter months perfecting vehicles' various electronic safety nets on slippery surfaces. During my two years at Bosch, I was one of them.
As oppressive as the cold was, the worst part was the boredom. Well, worst for most people. Nearly every woman of childbearing age was already a mother, typically multiple times over. For those male locals and winter transplants unable to secure female companionship, the weirdness took on a frat-house bent: facial-hair-growing contests, evenings of amateur handwriting analysis, or challenges to eat nothing but corn for a day or longer. At least the private bathroom in Bosch's office had a sign-out sheet and could be booked in advance. And, of course, there was plenty of after-hours drinking. Fortunately for our professional relationships, drinking contests were typically drama-free and most often concluded with a firm, collegial handshake.
You know you're in a social void when the meat raffle at the American Legion is a big deal. Even on those nights when slabs of raw meat weren't up for grabs, the Legion was a regular haunt. A frozen pizza and a half-dozen or so Grain Belt beers wouldn't even break the per diem. But trapped in such close confines with our coworkers, we ended up learning things about one another we wish we hadn't. Like that our boss could wrap his mouth completely around the circumference of a pint glass before downing its contents.
These were the normal weeks where, mercifully, we could work long hours. But particularly late in the winter, the weather would turn just warm enough to spoil the various frozen test surfaces, putting a halt to the work. That's when things really turned bleak. We dubbed one such week "spring break" and convinced our pint-glass-swallowing boss to drive us a few towns over to an ever-so-slightly more populated bar scene while we all wore grass skirts and leis. We could almost sense the we're-going-to-kick-your-ass stares from the locals before we even made our grand, sashaying entrance. We might have been seduced by the "Welcome Spring Breakers" ads on the local TV channel. We also might have paid for those ads.
Just remember that grass skirts don't have pockets. You don't want to lock yourself out of the house in Baudette. Because 30 below is really freaking cold.
From the December 2018 issue
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