So much that is important in this world involves relationships.  There’s that first one with Mom, which is sort of where it all starts, then all of those that follow.  With any luck, at least a few of these are nurturing or life enhancing in one way or other.  In old age, meaningful relationships become really important for well-being, and can even extend one’s life, which may or may not matter to you.  For some, one close relationship might suffice, and it needn’t be with a human.  Some claim a dog or cat or other such creature is superior to the homo sapiens variety, while others will tell you their close personal relationship with Jesus Christ as their lord and savior is the only way to go.  What follows is about none of that.  It concerns one’s personal relationship with snow.

Can you believe that around half of the human race has no relationship with snow whatsoever, and that somebody actually bothered to figure that out?  That leaves the other half, and the assumption is that this includes you.  If that is not the case, you might consider reading no further.  A personal relationship with snow can be as basic as viewing it from afar, atop distant peaks in the Absarokas, or capping Mt Fuji, as depicted in all those wonderful woodblock prints by Katsushika Hokusai, thirty six in all.  Or it might be something more direct but still casual, like that time you drove over Loveland Pass and everybody got out and threw snowballs, until they realized how cold it was and how in no way were they properly clothed, and you all packed back into the warm vehicle and headed downhill to Denver, and comfort.  

Or maybe you even stayed in a snowy place for a time, if only on a week’s vacation somewhere.  Maybe you tried skiing, on the so-called bunny slope, or maybe that was a bit too daunting and you hiked around on snowshoes, which were not nearly as clunky as you’d feared.  You appreciated the snow, so white and pure and pleasing in the way it smoothed out and re-contoured the world, making everything kind of streamlined.  It was also a bit slippery, as your shoes lost traction at times on the icy sidewalk, and when the same occurred with your vehicle, it was a bit unnerving, if only briefly.  And you thought all-wheel drive was infallible;  silly you.

Or maybe you grew up in a snow belt, where the magic of snow could close the schools at times, something truly magical, as was the joy of sledding and making snowmen and all that other fun kid stuff that generates fond memories for years afterwards.  Your parents seemed less than happy when they had to get to work, no snow days for them, and they complained about all the hassles of clearing off the car and the driveway, traveling on slippery roads where unexpected icy spots could spell peril, even with snow tires, and people would indeed slide into one another if their luck had run out.  The traffic jams could also be horrendous.  They’d be in a bad mood when they got home, and snow was definitely a mixed bag for everyone.

Or they got sick of it one day and moved far away to where it never snowed, places like California or Texas or Florida.  In the early days, back in the 1950s, only a few realized they were part of a great migration that has now endured for decades in America, one that continues to this day.  Call them snow belt refugees, not to be confused with all those other refugees flooding the world right now, due to economic or political hardship, violence or the ravages of climate change.  

Snow belt refugees flee nothing but a lot of damn inconvenience and what for them has become intolerable physical discomfort.  Admittedly things can also get awfully slippery out there, which introduces an element of danger, and if you are older, watch out, it’s not like when you were a kid and a fall was nothing.  The jury is out on whether the traffic in Phoenix or Fort Myers is not actually more threatening, but you makes your choices and takes your chances.  Snow belt refugees exist all around the world, with snow-weary folk moving south from Hokkaido to Honshu and Kyushu, or from Harbin down to Shanghai or even Guangzhou, or folks from Toronto and Montreal and Winnipeg fleeing  –  if such is the right word  –  to the warmer and barely snowy west coast of Canada.  In most other cold countries, truly getting the hell out to get warm usually requires taking the expat route, which certainly happens. There have long been Russians in Paris, for more reasons than mere politics.

But the focus, here, shall be on North America, where the story is more personal and familiar.  Human migration on this continent probably started with tribal peoples crossing the icy Bering land bridge from Siberia, another fiercely cold and snowy place, across to Alaska and eventually points south.  What is special about North America is how winter has such a marvelously strong grip over such vast stretches of its territory.  It’s a place where chilling Arctic air masses sweep readily across the vast open spaces of the west, towards points east and south, after which they will all too often clash with warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico or that arising from the waters of the Gulf Stream.  What you get is some of the most formidable winter weather on the planet, an unexpectedly long way from the Arctic Circle.

“Unexpected” is the operative word to describe what the early European settlers encountered along the continent’s eastern seaboard, and we’re not just talking dangerous wilderness and native peoples.  History books rarely mention that for many of them, part of the calculation was not just to venture to a land of greater opportunity of some kind, but also to benefit from the fact that they were heading a good ways south of England and continental Europe.  This was sure to mean warmer and more pleasant winters, right?  Jamestown, in fact, was a thousand miles nearer to the equator than London, around the same latitude as Sicily, surely a good place to plant tomatoes and olive trees and start a vineyard!

Well, not really.  Half the population of that initial English settlement died in the winter of 1607 for a number of reasons, though the unexpected harshness of the climate played a major role.  What historical records there are suggest that the Jamestown winters from 1607-10 were the eastern seaboard’s coldest and longest in a thousand years.  Annual snowfall in London at the time averaged around a foot, with Paris and Berlin getting even less. The Puritan Cotton Mather reported that London “is never so horribly snowed upon” as what they encountered in Massachusetts.  As for the winter of 1716-17, the year of the so-called Great Snow, Reverend Mather described a “time of much rebuke from Heaven upon us…such storms and heaps of snow visit us in the approach of spring, as were hardly ever known in the depth of winter.”  Through the lens of a colonial preacher, the falling of a gazillion flakes was nothing less than the wrath of God. 

Some number of intrepid colonists did in fact head back to warmer if not sunnier England and the European continent, where God was evidently more merciful.  Those plucky newcomers who stuck it out, along with the many more that kept coming (who at some point all knew the weather they were up against) were treated to worthy sequels of the Great Snow. There was the Hard Winter of 1740-41, when Boston harbor froze solid for 31 days and an ice bridge connected Long Island to the mainland.  A few years later brought the winter of 1772-73, which featured what became known as the “Washington and Jefferson” snowstorm, so-called as both mentioned it in their diaries.  George described “the snow being up to the breast of a tall horse everywhere.”  The history textbooks’ description of the harsh winter at Valley Forge suffered by General Washington and the troops in 1777 is no patriotic exaggeration;  over 2000 soldiers died.

Yet after the American Revolution, the ever hopeful colonists kept coming, to a new country offering more opportunity than ever.  The cultural mindset towards the difficult weather evolved.  Some of this was due to taking cues from the native peoples, who had long adapted to weather challenges that their ancestors had faced for thousands of years.  Winter for them was just another divine aspect of the Creator, something to inspire awe and reverence rather than any sense of divine punishment.  In a similar fashion, transplanted Europeans found ways to not just survive but to thrive.  By the early 19th century, the North American winter had become just another season, challenging and in ways downright dangerous, but nothing to outmatch human resourcefulness and ingenuity.

This attitude went so far as to recognize that winter even had some advantages over other seasons.  Frozen lakes and rivers could readily be used for transport of people and goods.  A heavy sledge on a frozen surface moves with remarkably less friction than a wagon on land.  A sleigh with runners moves with tremendous efficiency over packed snow, and at some point towns and cities began to employ huge rollers along roads and streets to facilitate this.  Don’t remove the snow, silly, as it just keeps coming.  Instead pack it, hard.  You’ve long known the lyrics to Jingle Bells, and been subject to endless renditions of the Sleigh Ride Song over the winter holidays, but have you ever actually gone for a ride?

Put yourself back in that time and imagine it, for a moment:  the crispness of the air, the steady clip clop of the horse’s hooves, the unbelievable speed and silence.  Kind of scary, really, all of it so easy, almost magical.  One wonders what Dobbin felt, especially on the downhills when that sleigh full of people put no pressure on the harness, none at all, with no sound but those tinkling little bells.  Oh what joy it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh.  It’s about joy, and did you know that?  The joy of snow, and of winter.

Speaking of music and sleigh rides and joy, what about the Troika section of the Lieutenant Kije Suite?  A troika adds a couple more horsepower to the traditional one-horse, and one can only imagine how such a thing must’ve really moved.  Take a listen sometime, and decide for yourself if the music gets this across.  Maybe Sergei Prokofiev had taken a few troika rides in his day, back in Russia before fleeing the Bolsheviks in 1917.   It is also possible he was a bit homesick when he wrote the piece in 1933, while living in Paris.  The speed!  The cold!  The silence!  Well, except for all the tinkling.  Listening to Kije suggests bells on sleigh harnesses might have also been a thing in imperial Russia;  the sound of three equines ringing in unison must have made quite a tintinnabulation.

If tintinnabulation is a new word for you, drop everything and seek out The Bells, the fabulous poem by E. A. Poe, posthumously published in 1849.  Poe being Poe, each stanza on the subject gets darker and darker, but oh, that first one!  It raves about the sound of horse-drawn sledges, most likely sliding along some recently rolled-down street in Baltimore, following the latest snowfall.  Keeping time time time in a sort of Runic rhyme  –  the man was clearly nuts, but in the most brilliant way.  Forget Jingle Bells, and go for the Poe!  Poe, who at least this one time could be joyous, thanks to the miracle of snow and the ringing harnesses of horses.  While you’re at it, take a listen to Phil Ochs, who put it to music.   

But getting back to Russia for a moment:  it goes without saying that that nation’s winters have a certain cachet.  Where else does winter get credit for being a national hero, having driven back awesome invading armies not just once, but twice?  The first to fall victim was Napoleon in 1812, a story immortalized not just in history books but in Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel, War and Peace. French losses were estimated at three hundred thousand, and many of those were not due to battle wounds.  The second epic weather miscalculation was by Adolph Hitler in 1941, with Operation Barbarossa, by some measures the largest military operation in history. That time the Russian army was a major factor, suffering losses in the millions, but as the underdogs the brutal winter weather was their essential ally, for which the Germans were totally unprepared.  

And is David Lean’s film production of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago not the absolutely coldest and most spectacular portrayal of snow and winter ever presented?  That one was about the time Russia invaded itself (those Bolsheviks again) and of course there are some troika scenes in there somewhere.  Prokofiev would’ve certainly approved, though he didn’t get to do the musical score.  Chances are he would’ve hated Lara’s Theme by the Frenchman Maurice Jarre, but we shall never know. 

Of course the culture that has the most intimate relationship with snow is that of the Inuit.  As children back in the 1950s we all knew that “eskimos have a dozen words for snow” but that’s as far as it went.  It turns out the ancient tribal peoples of the Arctic have way more than a dozen words for snow as well as ice,  and even more for the weather conditions that generate them, since getting all the distinctions down can spell the difference between surviving and succumbing.  Some examples are “qanikcaq” (snow on the ground), “qanuk” (snowflake), “kaneq” (frost),  “kanevvluk” (fine snow), and “nutaryuk” (fresh snow).  

Even everyday skiers can break it down into a few simple categories like powder and fresh, “corn” and “transformed,” if there’s been a thaw followed by a refreezing.  One gets a feel for how the quality of the snow can affect the entire skiing experience for the day, and there’s a certain pleasure to be had in using the correct wax to adapt to changing conditions.  But with skiers it’s all about fun; survival is a whole other matter, and the elaborate Inuit vocabulary reflects this.

It is also a fact that the Arctic regions remain inhabited;  there has not been a mass migration to points south by the Inuit, though some number have left, many for economic reasons.  By the same token, most people living in parts of the world that know real winter have not abandoned them for other places, despite all the sun belt mania, and there are some like this writer who’ve actually gone the other way, quite literally.  It helps if you love snow, which does not preclude the fact that snowy outcomes at times can also generate powerful negative emotions, annoyance and anxiety and even fear, though maybe not the fear of Divine retribution that bothered guys like Cotton Mather.  

It can also be said that outside of the Arctic region, northern places in the modern world have struggled mightily with snow and winter weather.  Blame it on progress, the coming of the railroads and then the automobile, both a factor in the increase in population of the cities and out across the wider landscapes, which for so long had contained only small numbers of tribal people, then settlers.  This is nowhere more evident than in modern day North America, where snow more than a few inches deep, or even just the possibility of that occurring, can send whole populations into a panic.  A forecast for six inches or more can lead to schools closing and mobs at the supermarket clearing out the bread and milk aisles, not to mention the junk food.  There are reasons why Accuweather and The Weather Channel and others of their ilk have huge audiences, and every commercial station plants reporters on streets across the snow-forecasted area, to give us up-to-the-minute reports on how much has fallen, which all too often isn’t much, at all.  Viewers eat that stuff up; go figure.

But think back again to the heyday of the sleigh ride, which was two hundred years ago.  As Blake McKelvey tells it in Snow in the Cities:  “the delights of gliding over the snow-packed streets and rural roads prompted residents of towns and cities to defer distant journeys until the snows arrived…After each storm subsided, many joined their neighbors in hitching horses to heavy sleds to break open the roads for merry and jingly sleigh rides about town.”  The peculiar irony lies in the stuff of physics, of traction and friction and the fact that a sledge and a sleigh can benefit from what happens to water when it freezes, if you manage it right, while anything much heavier not employing runners loses traction, to the point where it can’t move, at all.  A train can often keep moving, but only until enough snow piles up on the rails, or plants a deep enough snowbank across the tracks.  At which point you’ve got to get that snow outta the way!  Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.  It was the railroad that created the snow plow.  

And it turns out the snowplow was a key factor in the success of the automobile which followed, where a heavy vehicle on rubber tires not only slides around on snow, but just as often goes nowhere at all until a plow clears things up.  An exponential increase in automobiles and roadways demands an equivalent increase in the number of plows, of course, and until your particular street or roadway gets cleared, you’re out of luck.  Or at least you were until the advent of chains, then studs, then snow tires (the best modern ones use hydrophilic rubber), then all wheel drive, but once the snow gets deep enough, all this cleverness is useless until the plow comes by.  Of course, nobody’s required to utilize any of these if they so choose, at least in the Land of the Free, so many folks out there pray for adequate plowing, and nowadays sanding and salting, whatever it takes to facilitate travel when they should probably stay home.  

We shall not go into the potential ecological disaster presented by massive salting operations, but think about it.  While you’re at it, think about how under fairly common near-freezing conditions, Ma Nature all by herself can turn roadways into what is known as black ice, which is as sinister as it sounds.  This phenomenon can be greatly abetted by numerous tires compressing a sleety snowfall.  The upshot is that no technology has thus far been developed that provides much if any traction, at all, under such conditions.  What does work is if everybody really slows down, and we all know how well that works.  Watch the news on any day when temperatures hover at the freezing mark, and see for yourself what goes on out there on the roads.  

There is a deep irony in all this snowy mayhem.  All one need do to discover it is to take a walk, right now, while it’s still coming down.  It’s better if it’s night time, or the rush hour mass hysteria has come and gone and everybody’s home, snug and safe inside with their hot chocolate and their devices.  The fact is, nothing silences the cacophony of a city or adds another layer of tranquility to a countryside like a snowfall.  There’s something about a fresh blanket of snow on the ground plus a curtain of flakes, the thicker the better, that absorb sound almost as if they were designed to do just that.  It helps that those who choose to venture out at such times are much less likely to encounter others, as civilized humans have long been conditioned to shun snowy weather events, unless absolute necessity demands it.  

Think emergency responders and postal delivery people, to name a few.  As for the latter, surely you’ve heard tell of their informal motto:  Neither snow nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.  Would you believe those words are derived from a description by Herodotus, of the courier service in the ancient Persian empire?  If the letter carrier on our block (as they’re known in Boston) knew the grand history of those words, would they take their winter duties a bit more seriously, assuming they know the motto, at all?

Speaking of words, one could make a case that one of the greatest descriptions of a winter scenario was Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, a short poem found in so many high school English-class anthologies.  We read it back in the 9th grade, on some warm southern California afternoon.  Teacher used it as a basic lesson in literary interpretation, though almost nobody present cared a whit about that.  But Stopping seemed pretty straightforward, an excellent primer for any aspiring lit majors in the room:  surely the “lovely, dark and deep” woods represent the unknowable universe, the “promises to keep” the obligations that compel us to move on, even when we might wish to pause a moment to ponder the imponderable awhile. And the “miles to go before I sleep” line that gets repeated at the end sums up how life can be a long journey of many years, before we finally move on to the next life, or to nothing whatsoever for those of the dust-to-dust school.  The hope seems to be that we’ll finally get a break of some kind, God knows we’ve earned it.

At least that’s sort of how it went, with the guidance of an English teacher who, one hopes, was enthusiastic.  What is curious is that it’s quite likely that few in that classroom had any experience with what the esteemed New England poet was describing.  It may have been nobody.  It is only all these years later that this nobody can tell you he has now been there, done that, had a taste of the experience on a number of occasions which the words ever so simply and brilliantly describe, with their almost singsong repetitive rhyme scheme.  The essence of that experience is serenity, of a kind that can only be known in a snowfall, as Mr. Frost so perfectly nails it.  That, and nothing more, as this nobody sees it, and isn’t that more than enough?  Call it the genius of a poet interpreting the essence of a weather condition and expressing the inherent beauty of it all , if that makes any sense.

At some point that same year another anthology, or maybe the same one, offered up the short story Silent Snow, Secret Snow by Conrad Aiken.  If you’ve never heard of it, do yourself a favor and find it online where it is readily available, and take a half hour to read it. It’s also about the special serenity of a snowfall, but takes the whole lovely concept and turns it into something much more sinister and grim, as well as captivating.  Again, our English class dutifully kicked around what was going on in Aiken’s tale, while none of us likely knew a thing about the allure of softly falling flakes and their magical aftermath.  Even the most bored and distracted students in the class figured out that the kid featured in the story was kind of nuts and growing crazier with each page.  But only truly knowing the allure of total peace that a snowfall offers, having been there, can one start to see that there was a method to all the tragic madness swirling around that child’s brain, in a way that made perfect sense.  Now that’s something tragic, and truly frightening.  

Boston recently had what was by some measures a decent snowfall, something not all that special in past winters but this time special, indeed, the first one that was more than just a dusting in several years.  It delivered some long forgotten serenity, nothing as deep as described above, but enough to trigger cherished memories that are gradually receding.  Thank God Robert Frost saw fit to immortalize this phenomenon with his poem.  Measurable snowfall on our street can turn into something ugly pretty quickly, but we’ve the benefit of a large park nearby with one section actually known as The Wilderness, though it’s really more like a very modest stand of trees with a network of paths.  

One can imagine walking up there on an evening’s snowfall and running into a fellow standing next to his sleigh and horse in the darkness, contemplating the scene.  We won’t, of course, disturb the moment by saying anything, and maybe, just maybe, the little horse will give his harness bells a shake, to ask if there is some mistake, and we’ll be blessed with that delicate glorious sound, unmistakable in the ever so soft darkness laced with whiteness.  And we’ll assure the little guy that it’s no mistake, no mistake, at all.

(much of the historical information presented here was brazenly lifted from Snow: A History of the World’s Most Fascinating Flake by Anthony R. Wood,which you should seek out if you’re a fan of these matters)

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