Speechless

I am sitting here in my snug little apartment while a winter storm rages across the tundra outside.  I grew up in Montana, lived in Idaho and Wyoming and I have never in my life seen weather like this.  The temperature is somewhere around -5 with a wind chill of -20 or so.  That is not so amazing but the wind good lord!  The wind blows down from the tundra and there is nothing to stop it.  It blows 40-50 miles an hour and has wind burts of 60 miles an hour.  That is hard enough that the wind just reaches inside your mouth down to your lungs and grabs the air right out of you.  It leaves you feeling like you have had the wind knocked out of you.  The snow is like sand from a sand blaster hitting you again and again as you try to stand in the wind.  It knocks Isa right over and pushes her.  Needless to say this pisses her off and she screams how much she hates the weather here.  Of course you can't hear her over the wind.  

Still that is not the amazing part, that is not what leaves me speechless.  As I gape open mouthed staring out side at the weather at 9:00 at night I can see two kids on a snowboard boarding down a hill by the school.  I guess with this wind they can really get going......tough son of a guns!  There are only 700 people in this village and in the last half hour that I have sat here looking out the window I have seen at least ten trucks, 7 four-wheelers, and 2 snow machines.  Where in the world are these folks going and why?????  My question is do they enjoy going out in this weather?  A test of manhood?  Some kind of initiation right of passage thing?  Or are they just insane?