In Edgar Allan Poe's hair-raising “The Cask of Amontillado,” a man consumed by his hate and humiliation extracts the last dram of revenge against his lifelong tormentor by slowly building a dungeon of death around him. He does it methodically brick by brick, as the chained victim looks on in horror.

Painstakingly, he recounts the injuries and insult he has suffered at the hands of the arrogant Fortunato before sealing him into eternity with the final brick of vindication.

I want the record to show that I am not nearly as homicidal as the lethal mason of Poe’s story. But I also want it to show that at 4 p.m. on March 26--MARCH 26 IN THE STATE OF MINNESOTA--I slowly slid the glass of my car’s skylight to the full open position. Under a cornflower sky and with a half dozen celebratory robins on the wing overhead, I wallowed in the incendiary breezes of 66 degrees Fahrenheit.

This is documented by the U.S. Weather Bureau. As far as I know the weather bureau is the only agency of the federal government that is not now under investigation by a select committee of nonpartisan politicians. That reading was an impregnable 66 degrees, at 4 p.m. in Minnesota on March 26. It can’t be impeached or declassified.

I am at peace.

I don’t want to fly under false colors. I’ll admit being a self-appointed truth squad and public defender of Minnesota weather. It’s a lonely job. I don’t make these announcements noisily, and especially within earshot of my wife. She arrived in Minnesota from California several years ago and early in our courtship took me seriously when I said Minnesotans save money at the gas pump by snowshoeing to work in January, right up into the skyways. The next day she had actually begun surfing the Internet for flight departure times for San Francisco before I convinced her this was a folk ballad popular among survivors of the 1940 Armistice Day blizzard.

Why am I going public with these ramblings at a ripening stage of my life? An old Army barracks pal phoned me from Georgia a few days ago telling me of his plans to visit in Minnesota soon and asking me, deadpan, if he should bring his skates for my driveway.

It never ends. I railed against this predictable crudity. He told me to chill out. He said, “If I have to hear your harangue about everybody slandering Minnesota weather one more time, I’m going to start calling you a megalomaniac.”

“Why?”

“You know about St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes?”

I said I’d heard.

“You’re the only candidate I know who wants to succeed him.”

He also said I was in denial and he knew of a club that could help me.

I don’t have to be derailed by rockheads from Stone Mountain. There are some issues at stake. One of them goes to the creeping stereotyping of Swedes and Norwegians, with whom I’ve lived proudly for decades. In undoing an injustice I expect most of my readers to nurture the instincts of reason and fairness, notwithstanding the fact that most of them probably live in Minnesota and have given up the fight and joined the jeering chorus. A lot of the ethnic stereotyping of Scandinavians pictures these people as reserved and stoical. The evidence often cited is that many of the Swedish and Norwegian settlers, especially the more practical ones, performed the act of love without bothering to remove their skis when they came indoors.

We’re not talking downhill skis. We’re talking clunky, wide-bottom, ocean-going ski jumping skis.

This is defamation. I credit the Swedes and Norwegians for taking it without complaining or filing lawsuits. It’s not that the stories were necessarily wrong. I do think they kept their skis on but not because they were passionless and uncreative. I think it proves that as love-making partners the early Swedes and Norwegians were true athletes, virtually acrobatic athletes, which may explain why there are so many gold medal winners from Sweden and Norway at the Winter Olympics.

I also believe that at the very least they loosened their binders.

I will give you this: Occasionally it gets cold in Minnesota. It doesn’t usually start until Labor Day. It’s probably also true that until the Twins and Vikings arrived in Minnesota the most popular spectator sport in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul was to go down to the shore of Wayzata Bay and watch the ice melt on Lake Minnetonka in May.

The event attracted throngs. But I grew up in northern Minnesota and developed a certain regional pride in the boundless delights of camping out in the snow at below zero. Long after I moved to Minneapolis I’d take a pair of skis, a tent, a Svea camp stove and go into the frozen Boundary Waters just south of the Canadian border for a weekend of solitary wandering through the firs and beaver dams. I tell you it can be a discovery. Because nights get long in winter up there, I’d usually bring something to read. One year it was Erica Jong’s raunchy “Fear of Flying.” I lit the little overhead lamp, settled into my sleeping bag and read. The passages got bluer and wilder and one of them launched me into gusts of laughter. I heard loud thrashings outside the tent, and what sounded like contemptuous snorting that eventually subsided. The next morning I found the prints of a huge moose, which was probably wondering what would they do next to screw up winter in Minnesota.

I don’t know how you apologize to a moose, but it’s a question that deserves an answer. When I got into the news business and wrote for several years for the Associated Press in Minneapolis we would get an annual order from the general desk in New York as soon the first cold wave hit. “We’d like a picture of frozen underwear on the line in northern Minnesota.” One year I rebelled. “How about getting a frozen underwear picture from Buffalo, New York?” I wired back. I got an answer from the general desk: “They say they don’t wear long underwear in Buffalo.”

So we’re not only colder in Minnesota but we’re déclassé. It got more tiresome as the years went and in the columns I wrote for the Minneapolis newspaper I grew more belligerent about the stereotypes of Minnesota weather. For much of the 20th Century, WCCO-AM was the dominant radio voice in Minnesota. It had first-rate broadcasters but partly to preserve its big listenership and partly because it got very proprietary about the weather, WCCO became the Big Brother of weather reporting and warning. In the spring tornado season they would come with submarine ooga horns and gongs that blasted you out of your chair. The message was clear. If you didn’t listen to WCCO you could get killed in the southwestern corner of your basement or whichever was the wrong corner. In winter the sight of the day’s first falling snowflake triggered the station’s staff into a frenzy of doomsday warnings: Stay off the streets. Don’t drive downtown. Close the schools. It got to be that if a kid actually wanted to go to school, and did, he was a schlump. The shopkeepers started to howl about the empty streets and I said the station might need some remedial courses in the virtues of peace and quiet.

It took us four years before we talked to each other again.

(Editor’s Note: For his approaching birthday, we are sending Jim Klobuchar a version of the newest weather almanac, with the Minnesota section mercifully whited-out.)

Copyright (c) 2004 Jim Klobuchar