My speaking travels have taken some interesting twists and turns over the years. One was particularly interesting.
One winter I received a phone call from a speaker’s bureau with which I had worked for several years. The call came just after noon. The owner of the bureau asked if I was available to do a speaking engagement “in the next few days.” I informed him that I was, indeed, available. He then asked if I would be willing to make a speaking engagement in Grand Forks, ND on the upcoming Wednesday morning.
As it turns out, two speakers were hopelessly snowed in near Chicago, and neither could make it to Grand Forks. Fortunately, we found out, I could fly “over” the snowstorm from Nashville to Minneapolis and “beyond” the snowstorm from Minneapolis to Grand Forks.
In checking with the airline, I found I could take a 6 am flight out of Nashville on Tuesday morning which would get me into Grand Forks by 4 pm on Tuesday afternoon. That was certainly practical, and workable.
In the hour that followed, as he shared specific details of the speaking engagement. Over several phone conversations, it became apparent that the bureau owner preferred that I leave Nashville earlier. In researching airline schedules, he found a Delta flight which departed Nashville at 6 pm, Monday, arriving Grand Forks at 10:55 pm on the same day. He almost insisted I take the earlier flight “to make sure I got there.”
So, after a few frantic hours of reorganizing the coming week, I found myself in the Nashville International Airport awaiting the departure of my 10:55 pm flight. As I sat in the terminal waiting area collecting my thoughts, I received an email from Delta Airlines on my cell phone informing me that my Minneapolis to Grand Forks flight was going to be delayed one hour, making my arrival time approximately midnight. I breathed a deep, long, tired sigh of resignation. I could see a long night ahead.
When I arrived on time in Minneapolis, I found the second leg of my trip had been delayed for another hour.
Now, I have traveled enough over the years to have learned how to make use of down time in an airport, but four hours is a stretch.
Fortunately, a girl’s high school ice hockey team, on its way back home to Winnipeg, was sharing the same flight with me. They were most entertaining. Their antics and the book I were reading seemed to make the time fly. These girls were all over the airport, laughing, listening to their iPod, horsing around, and bantering back and forth.
By the time we boarded the plane, they were worn out. The one-hour flight to Grand Forks was very quiet.
I arrived in Grand Forks, ND at 2:35 am CDT on Tuesday morning. The temperature was minus 20 degrees with a wind chill of minus 35.
When I was a boy growing up and attending public schools, most classrooms had a room called the cloak (or coat) room. Over the years, I have noticed cloak rooms in all kinds of buildings here in the south. They can be found in hotels, theaters, symphony halls, churches, etc. Thing is, they are used very rarely.
Over the course of my professional speaking career, I have been to the Dakotas many times. And here is one thing I have noticed. In that part of the world, they have cloak rooms…and they use them. In the wintertime you see cloak rooms crammed full of coats - coats hanging everywhere! And now, I am sure why. I thought I had felt cold until I ran into minus 20 degrees. I find you have to be careful how you breathe.
From the first time I met some of the farmers from what former WSMV weatherman, Bill Hall used to call the “upper-Mid-west”, I sensed them to be a hardy kind of people. They must be to survive the winters up there.
While visiting with some of the farmers who attended the meeting where I spoke, I ran into one older man who shared an observation.
As we talked about the cold of the night before, he said, “I had an old Angus cow deliver a calf out in the open in a minus 35 wind chill last night. She licked him off and got him up; and he got a belly-full of warm milk. He was standing beside her this morning.”
“When you live off the land, you see miracles every day,” he beamed.
The light in his eyes was worth the trip.
Copyright 2026 by Jack McCall
