As I write this, snowing is falling west of Detroit, in Kalamazoo and Battle Creek and other places snow has not fallen so hard, so early for several years. Road crews are out trying to unslipperyize the roads. In Chicago, Mayor Richard M. Daley is trying to figure out how to plow more snow for less money. Good luck with that.
By Sunday, the storm, or one just like it, is forecast to begin blanketing Maine. I look at the jet stream on the Weather Channel and wonder whether there will be snow in Gettysburg.
The hint of coming Winter, and the sudden necessity to point the Jeep into it, has me thinking of winters left behind. Winters when, for instance, snow piled up 24 inches at a time between October and February — and then came the really big storms. Winters when March really did come “in like a lion, out like a lamb.”
Winters like that haven’t happened in a long time, although back in ’97 an ice storm made life a bit rough in New England. Miles and miles of trees and power lines were down. Outside the cities, where people still heated with wood, the loss of electricity was an inconvenience, but in the more urban areas, where electricity was required to fire the oil burners, kerosene dealers made a killing as folks used small space heaters to keep from freezing. Utility crews from Pennsylvania and South Carolina drove their rigs to Maine and New Hampshire to help get the juice flowing again.
The TV weatherman said this morning (Dec. 3, 2008) that from 1957 to 1987, the heavy snow came to Michigan in January. From 1987 to 2007, it came in December. It’s early, yet, but it is December, and here it comes again.
As a youngster, during the first part of the aforementioned 1957 to 1987 period, I lived in a town so small the “Welcome to” and “Come Back Soon” signs were on the same two-by-four. We’d have used a four-by-four, but the year the expense was on the Town Meeting warrant, we could only raise enough for the smaller post.
Snow plow drivers didn’t start their truck motors until there was three inches on the ground and more falling. It took about six hours for the two trucks to plow all the town’s roads, by which time, if the snow still fell, they would grab a cup of coffee and start again. At an inch an hour — not an uncommon rate — snow would be six inches deep by the time the plow got back around where you lived. Deeper if the driver dropped the rig into a ditch that had been hidden by a snowdrift.
One year, so the story goes, the snow was falling so fiercely that by the time Jack Howard reached the end of his route, he couldn’t tell where the snow banks ended and the drifts began. He’d plowed a quarter mile into the Barkers’ lower cornfield before he realized the road had gone left and he hadn’t.
Nobody worried much about how much snow would fall in a forecast storm. It was, after all, Winter in Maine. Or Detroit. Winter in the north country is pretty much Winter in the north country. Except on the lee (downwind) side of the Great Lakes.
In February 1977, my son and I took a Greyhound bus from Maine to Buffalo, N.Y. We had planned to ride the bus all the way to Detroit, where I was to take delivery on a new Dodge van.
But Interstates west of Buffalo were buried. We finally had to catch a flight across Lake Erie. Back on the Interstate highway, headed south for Cincinnati, Ohio, we drove by 18-wheelers buried whole. Only an exhaust stack or corner of a trailer poked out to reveal their resting place.
So long has passed since those big-storm winters, most of us rush out to the grocery store any time the weatherman says more than an inch is likely by morning. I figured out a few years ago the grocery store chains recruit meteorologists in Texas, and put them on TV in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Maine, where they can be properly excited at the prospect of two or three inches of snowfall.
Like grocers in Florida during hurricane season, proprietors in the snow country love the way shoppers clean the store shelves when they see a storm, however small, forecast for morning.
So while you are reading this with your morning coffee, I will be somewhere the forecasters say may have several inches of new powder — the kind of stuff that gives skiers heart palpitations. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Readers may contact John Messeder at jmesseder@comcast.net.
