Snowbound

I don’t really live in the “north country”. Pennsylvania is firmly Middle Atlantic, and especially in the eastern half of the State, the Atlantic is the most important part of the descriptor. The ocean, just over there beyond New Jersey, typically moderates our winter weather. A “normal” winter here is grey, wet, and miserable, but not very snowy. Ice storms are common, as is plain old cold rain with air temperatures in the high thirties or low forties: considerably less fun than a big ol’ dump of snow.

Maybe once a decade or so, a combination of two weather systems will produce a spectacular winter storm here. Conditions have to be perfect, as does the timing of everything; thus the rarity. Our cold weather comes from the west and northwest, from the jet stream of the continental interior and ultimately from Arctic Canada. Typically these “clipper” systems move fast, sometimes have a modest amount of dry snow, and plenty of cold air. Our wet weather comes from the south, as Atlantic storms run north and eastward along the coast. Occasionally, one of these coastal storms will collide with a western clipper right over Pennsylvania and the other Middle Atlantic states. The head of the clipper system slams into the advancing low pressure coming from the south, and it begins to curl back on itself. This sets up a counterclockwise rotation within the system that brings Atlantic moisture and frigid air into the continent from the northeast as the system itself moves toward the northeast; a Nor’easter. The cold air is dry, and has the capacity to suck up a hell of a lot of water.

To make a long story short, my part of the world had two of these storms in the space of five days. It left the Middle Atlantic region buried in three to five feet of snow. It closed some Interstates. It knocked out power for days in some areas. It drifted into piles 10 feet deep or more in places. Snowplows entombed people’s cars and driveways behind glaciers of plowed snow. The effects were amplified by the general lack of preparedness by regional State and local governments for something like this. In their defense, governments budget and prepare for what is normal and this most assuredly ain’t! Baltimore and Washington were paralyzed.

I spent much of my 20’s in Montana, including seven winters, so I have had to retrieve the necessary adaptive skills from my memory banks. First, I shoveled a series of tunnel-like paths to my firewood pile and the garbage can, and removed the glacier left by the snowplow from the parking spots. I next dug a series of paths for my English Setter to access the backyard, which pleased him immensely. He stands maybe 18 to 20 inches at the shoulder, and his you-know-what therefore drags in the frigid snow.

A little of this goes a long way, apparently.

Following the shoveling, I sat down with paper and pen and began to make an itinerary. The resulting list, a mix of chores and diversions for the next few days, is the key to being snowed in. In deep winter, the mind craves discipline; else it strays to dark places. If you want to see what I mean, pick up a newspaper in Montana, North Dakota or Wyoming in, say, late March or early April, after people have been snowed and frozen in for three, four, or even five months. There, under the State News section, you can read about the quiet ranch wife who, tiring of her husband’s snoring or perhaps his drinking or droning on about her mother, buried the kindling axe in his noggin at the breakfast table. It being too cold to bury his profoundly dead ass, she stacks him in the shed with the cordwood, and drapes a dishtowel over his face. He has perished from what is known in real winter country as “the shack nasties”.

North Country people know all about this and so they meet winter on her own terms. They save certain tasks for winter evenings. They vary their routines. They read good books, and try not to overdo the TV. They make sure to get outdoors every day if possible. They try not to drink too much. They give their partners and children attention, space and respect. They remain self aware. It can be very hard work, but you must remember; you are not just waiting for spring, you are living in winter.

Big winter can force you to remember that behind all of our highly evolved technology and infrastructure, is raw nature, waiting to cut off the electricity and freeze you to death. Humanity does not always run the show. In 1986, I was living in a small logging town in Northwestern Montana. On the Friday of Valentine’s Day weekend, it got so dark at mid-afternoon that the street lights came on. A great storm straight from the Gulf of Alaska made it over the Cascades and the Purcell Range and the dense black mass of low pressure hung on the Northern Rockies. It began to snow. To this day, I have never seen it snow like that, and even elderly locals said the same thing at the time. There was not a puff of wind, and the snow came straight down, inches per hour. It snowed like that without a pause until Sunday afternoon, and it just buried us. Even Montana’s muscular snow removal systems were overwhelmed as the trucks simply couldn’t keep up.

It took me five hours just to dig a tunnel-like path to the likely location of my car, and excavate it. While I was digging, a piece of snow the size of a Cadillac came loose from the metal roof of my rented house and landed on my elderly neighbor who was running a snow blower and didn’t see it coming. His wife and I dug him out, and he was lucky it didn’t kill him. The entire county was more or less shut down for four days or so. The power came and went. People were left to their own devices.

So we hunkered down, and we stayed busy, and we marveled at the huge piles and drifts. Eventually, things went back to normal, spring came, and we forgot the storm. We remembered it again in mid-November however, when the County Hospital set an all-time record for newborns, and even dresser drawers had to be lined with blankets and pressed into service as bassinets as the small birthing center was overwhelmed by the flood of new life.

Funny what people will get up to when it’s cold, dark and snowy, no?