Spindrift

It is snowing again. It has been a winter of single digit cold, fast moving clippers of snow and freezing rain, followed by blasts of arctic air. It has not been above freezing for more than a day here and there in a couple months. And now, a day before Saint Valentine’s Day, in what is late winter in the Mid Atlantic, a foot or so of snow.

People are getting crabby. Back when I lived in Montana, they called this dark-and-cold-induced malaise the “shack nasties”, and people died of it. Some years you’d pick up the paper in March and read about the ranch wife who solved the problem of her husband absent mindedly whistling “Camp Town Races” off key and under his breath literally all day for three months. She buried the kindling axe in his noggin over Cheerios and coffee at the breakfast table. It being too cold to dig a hole, the sheriff found him stacked neatly in the wood shed, next to the kindling.

Doo-Dah, Doo-Dah

While nothing quite so awful seems likely here, the weather is having its effects.

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Cookie, my English Setter, is a bird dog’s bird dog, from a proud lineage. His dignity is important to him. I put him out in the yard this morning, and then started coffee. Presently, I went to the back door to check on him to find him maybe 10 feet from the door immobile and glaring at me with the most baleful expression imaginable. His long legs notwithstanding, this is the deepest drift he has ever encountered, and his you-know-what is dragging in the snow. His hateful grimace conveys that this will never do, and further, that it is somehow my fault. He refuses to relieve himself or to come in until I get a shovel and clear a large enough place for his necessaries. After his ablutions are complete, he returns to his bed and will not look at me all day.

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I spent much of my morning completing and then varnishing the meticulous silk wraps that bind the guides to my cane fly rod, the first one I’ve built myself. This is painstaking, silent, disciplined and indoor work. It’s the antidote. As the storm beats on the window, and the snowplow entombs my little house behind a glacier, the wraps slowly wind on against each other, and the varnish transforms them to a deep translucent emerald tipped with fiery orange. The concentration and attention to detail entrance me, and I depart the storm for a soft green stream bank in early spring.

When I reach that stream, I will have with me a dozen or so freshly tied wetflies with bodies of bright green peacock and dark soft hackle collars. This is a simple and ancient pattern for the little stonefly so effective that the trout will chew them to pieces. They’ll be attached to a hand built leader that I’ll construct over the coming weekend when more snow and single digit temperatures are predicted. Even as I shove more wood in the stove, and prepare to start digging myself out again, the silk wraps and the wetflies confirm for me that death always yields to new life. The snow is water, and will soon enough fill the banks of streams. There will be green grass, and warm breezes, and the rings of feeding trout. The stoneflies will be hatching on the Letort before St Patrick’s Day, and I will be there to meet them, with this beautiful rod in my hand.

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It takes about 3 hours to shovel myself out. I learned how to do this from my grandfather, Giuseppe. When I knew him he was old, and deeply arthritic, and he moved slowly with his shovel, a narrow, metal flat shovel with a long handle. Younger men in my family laughed at him, at least initially. The measured pace made it possible for him to work for what seemed like forever, long after the younger folks went in for a lunch break. Half way up my mother’s long driveway, he’d stop for a large mug of very sweet tea, then he’d go back out again 20 minutes later. He would finish at the street, then start the sidewalks. He was in his 80’s.

When he was a young man, working for the Pennsylvania Railroad, he led gangs of men who hand cleared excess snow from the Rockville Bridge. The bridge is the longest stone arch structure in the world and is over a mile long. It is open to the north wind along its entire length. He learned from it. Specifically he learned that winter yields to pace, patience and determination, with occasional mugs of hot sweet tea.

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Back in the 80’s I was living in the little town of Libby Montana. Libby is in the northwest corner of the state, hard by the Idaho panhandle. For Montana, its climate is mild and pretty wet, in some ways more Pacific Northwest than Intermountain. Sometimes the big Pacific storms make it over the Cascades and arrive in the Purcells and Cabinets full of water.

One Friday, on Valentines weekend, the sky became so dark that the streetlights came on at about 3:00 PM. It began to snow. There was not a breath of wind. The snow came down in a perfectly vertical torrent, and piled up at a rate of several inches an hour. It snowed like that, without a pause, until Sunday afternoon, leaving in its wake about 50 inches of snow (in town…God knows what it left in the mountains). The storm paralyzed Lincoln County, which has lots of snow plows and is used to big storms. My neighbor’s snow blower threw snow against my house, and the resulting vibration dislodged a chunk of snow the size of a Cadillac which landed on him, knocking him unconscious. It took me until Tuesday to completely excavate my car. Late in the following November came the storm’s most significant result, as tiny Lincoln County hospital was overrun with babies. Babies occupied every cradle and crib, and were even placed in dresser drawers and bassinets lined with blankets.

When I read about the baby boom in the paper, I recalled that my own birthday is in late October. I too may be a child who arrived on a cloud of cold white fire. This pleased me no end.

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The snow picked up again just as I finished shoveling, lowering the ceiling of visibility to treetop level, and beginning to undo all my hard labor. I stood still, breathing hard, leaning on my shovel and letting the large wet flakes kiss me. I heard the geese long before the large V appeared low, right over me, in full cry. There must have been fifty of them. I noted with satisfaction that they were pointed into the weather. Appearances to the contrary, they know that spring is behind them, so they push on into the clouds.

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?