It snowed for most of the day today. It was only supposed to snow for a few hours. That was the declaration made yesterday. This happened last weekend, as well: a few hours of snow projected, which became several hours of snow. I would look out the window every hour to see snow still falling, simultaneously opening the weather app on my phone, which confirmed that it is indeed snowing. I took comfort in this digital affirmation of my physical experience.
Meteorology is often perceived as the most worthless science/profession by the majority of people, with meteorologists as its corrupt preachers. “These guys never know what the hell they’re talking about,” I hear time and again. There is an undertone of “who’s going to stand up to these crooks and put an end to this charade?” I think if it was truly that useless, an exposé would’ve come out already, in the same vein as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Nevertheless, a not-insignificant part of me is tempted to become a meteorologist to get behind the scenes and get to the bottom of the industry. Paranoia abounds within the American psyche. Walking down the street in Capitol Hill one day during 2020, the height of all sorts of events, I brushed by a man who was staring up at some telephone wires. “They’re up to something with these poles,” he said. “Oh, I know,” I replied, without stopping.
I like the snow. I wish we got more of it. I have fond memories of sledding and tubing in New York, when we’d get several feet of snow that would stick around for months. One time, on our way to a big tubing hill, my mom driving my step brother and my 13-year-old self down the interstate, a very large sheet of ice flew off the top of the trailer of a semi. It flipped and flew dozens of feet high into the air. I watched it the whole time, ascending, and then descending towards our car. If you recall the scene from LOTR RotK where a catapult from Minas Tirith launches a chunk of the castle hundreds of feet into the air towards Gothmog, the orc captain, it was just like that. SMACK right into my mom’s windshield, smashing the whole thing, but not breaking through. We ended up not going tubing that day.
I love shoveling snow. I love the community camaraderie that comes after a large snow storm, everyone trudging around slowly, shoveling sidewalks, the snow muting the white noise of the neighborhood with its vast soft blanket. Back in NY my mom hired a friend to plow her driveway. When he came, I would come outside and shovel. I chose this timing in the hopes that he would ask me to “weigh down” his plow by leaning my body on the front of it, after which he would push me around with the plow. This was a blast. I was 20 years old at the time and I was as giddy as could be. I think it was Bill Clinton who said an alien invasion would unite the world. I don’t think we even need that. I believe we just need one giant, years-long blizzard to unite the human race.
When I was younger, my dad had four snowmobiles to his name. As a child he would seat me in between himself and the handlebars when he went for a snowmobile trip. He went fast, really fast for my little brain. The whole time it felt like being on the edge of chaos. Within my helmet, my eyebrows would be up to my scalp line, eyes wide as cue balls, teeth bared while I’d go “GEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.” My little helmeted bobblehead would clunk clunk clunk against the front of my dad’s helmet a thousand times per trip whenever we hit a bump bump bump.
Whenever I walk into a typical grocery store wearing my Doctorate Martens after a snowfall, due to the lack of grip from wear, I do tend to slide into other patrons, as I go to exit an aisle, stop myself to look both ways, but keep sliding. I will be replacing the PhD Martens with another pair soon.
I detest driving in the snow, but I love walking through it. There is a desolate but serene feel to it. During a heavy snowfall a few years ago, a couple friends and I walked 5 miles round trip to the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory on the 16th Street Mall. I have felt few things as comforting as the warm, visible cloud of chocolate aroma that came wafting out of the shop when we opened the door on that cold day. Two days prior it was 70 degrees and sunny. “Only in Colorado!” And many other states.
I look forward to the snowmen that may be built after these recent storms. After the last one, someone had built a picturesque snowman in the front yard of a house I pass by on my walk to work every day. As each day passed, I would watch as it slowly drooped and slumped more and more, whittled away by the wind until it was just snowdust, like an immaculate sand mandala being blown away by Buddhist monks.
I also like ice skating and snowshoeing, though I have yet to do either of those things this season. I think it’s endearing that humans (and other species) create activities of perpetual motion with every element of nature or precipitous phenomenon. We think, “I don’t know what any of this is, but I bet I could glide across it somehow,” at the sight of a field of snow, a frozen lake; the sky, even. If goo started falling from the sky and accumulating on the ground (not out of the realm of possibility at this point), we would invent goomobiling and goo skating. Gooshoeing, even.
I have not fully laid in the snow in several years. I would like to go to the thrift store or Sierra Trading to buy snow pants and winter gloves and winter boots with the express purpose of lying in the snow for an indeterminate amount of time. After sliding down and walking back up the twenty foot hill to the right of my house thirty or more times, my legs about to give out, I remember laying myself down halfway up the hill and lying there for what felt like hours, letting the day go by as the occasional distant rumble of snow plows swept by. I remember the plows pushing all of the snow in the massive Kmart parking lot into a giant snow mountain in the center of the lot, so packed it would hurt to kick.
I don’t ski or snowboard.
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