I need to rethink my relationship with snow. I’m not sure just when I started hating snow so much.
As a kid growing up in central Ohio, I used to love the snow. At least I think I did. If my childhood memories are any indication, I think I must have…
I’d play with my brothers and sister for hours in the snow. We caught falling snowflakes on our tongues. You could eat snow by the handful; it never filled you up. We’d lie on our backs in a fresh plot of snow and flap our arms and legs to make flocks of snow angels.
We loved building snowmen, rolling the wet snow into firm-packed balls. If the snow was just right, you could roll up a ball that soon got so big you couldn’t move it another inch. That was usually how we knew the ball was big enough to become the base of a snowman. We’d always try to make the second snowball smaller so we could lift it onto the first. More often than not, that next ball of snow ended up being so big that we’d decide to make yet another snowman, with the second snowball for its base.
Sometimes, we’d just keep making huge snowballs, rolling them into a semicircle to build a snow fort. When other neighborhood kids were around, we’d make two of these forts, facing each other, and stock them with piles of firm-packed hand-sized snowballs, just right for throwing. A snow war would break out, and usually continue until someone got hit in the face and ran, crying, into the house.
On our more peaceful days, we often played a snow game called Fox and Geese. It was played on a wagon wheel-shaped grid, carefully paced off on a snowy field. One person was the fox, and everyone else was a goose. The fox would chase the geese around the grid, trying to catch them, thus turning them, one by one, into fellow foxes. As a goose, you had to stay on the spokes or the rim of the wheel as you ran away from the ever-increasing herd of foxes. If you ran off the grid, or if a fox tagged you, you instantly became one of them and had to assist in catching the remaining geese.
We’d play in the snow until our fingers and toes were numb, ‘til our cheeks blazed cherry red. We’d play until it hurt. Whatever happened to those days of unconditional love for snow?
My first memory of snow not being such a good thing comes from the eighth grade. It was after school and we kids were sitting in the school bus, awaiting the late arrival of our bus driver. We weren’t normally on the bus without an adult, but this day it was just a busload of kids, happy to be done with school for the day, and anxious to get home to after-school play.
As we waited, impatiently for the driver, some of the kids got off the bus and started playing in the snow; roughhousing, throwing snowballs at each other. A couple of kids still inside the bus had opened their windows to shout at the outside kids, and soon the open windows became a target for the snowballers. Not content for long to lob snowballs one at a time through the windows, the outside kids started scooping up as much snow as they could manage and dumping it through the open portals onto the unfortunate children still inside. In short order, the interior of the bus was awash with snow.
Just about this time, the bus driver finally arrived on the scene and proceeded to round up the snow-throwing hooligans. Sorry to say, I was one of this bunch. Unable to resist the lure of the mob mentality, I had joined in the melee, and now would have to answer for my sins. The price for 10 minutes of lawlessness? An entire week of detention: one hour after school each day under the watchful eye of our study hall jailer. My opinion of snow started to deteriorate.
My next negative memories of snow come after we moved from rural Ohio to Detroit, Michigan in the mid-1960’s. On frozen pre-dawn mornings, my brothers and I would be occasionally rousted from bed to “Shovel the driveway so your father can get the car out to go to work”.
We couldn’t eat Detroit snow the way we had in Ohio. In the country, the snow stayed pristine for days - sparkling white and clean, but Detroit snow started to turn a dirty gray almost as soon as it hit the ground, graphic evidence of the industrial pollution that was synonymous with the title of “The Motor City”.
In Detroit, we walked to school. In the wintertime, that walk became a mile-long obstacle course of icy sidewalks and slippery stairs. Danger seemed to accompany every step.
When I finished school and joined the ranks of the employed, I got to experience first-hand the joys of a frozen commute. Detroit streets were often icy in winter. Only the most heavily traveled arterials rated a visit from the snowplows and salt trucks. Lesser byways and side streets became a series of frozen ruts. In some places you could almost take your hands off the steering wheel and let the ruts guide your car. Fresh snow could be especially hazardous, since it was often underlayed by a sheet of ice.
When I moved to the Northwest in the 70’s I was thrilled to find that snowfall was a relative rarity in Seattle. I reveled in the thought that I might never have to drive on an icy highway again. Of course, my revelry was rudely shattered when it actually did snow. I was astounded by the drivers’ reaction to even a few snowflakes. “Don’t these people know how to drive in snow?” I wondered. I came to find out that most of them, in fact, did not. Winter snow really was the exception rather than the rule, and they had never become familiar with “Winter Driving” techniques.
After many years in the working world, including 100’s of thousands of commuter miles in rain, shine, and snow, I gave it all up a few years ago. I now work at home, my commute consisting of a few steps to my office, or a few more steps down a short path to one of my outbuildings. Now that I’m no longer part of the commuter set, I find that I don’t have quite the same distaste for the frozen white stuff. In fact, I love to watch large, moist snowflakes drifting down from the heavens. I rather enjoy seeing our gardens and trees covered in a fresh layer of sparkling snow. I love the silence it brings as it blankets the ground. I wonder if I still remember how to make a snow angel.
Maybe I need to rethink my relationship with snow.
By John R. Cumbow
