Posted Feb 10, 2003
I used to be a lot more hardy about snow.
Nowadays an inch or two on the windshield is enough to make me think twice about taking off on a toot, even if it hasn't stuck to the road.
Is it because I'm getting fragile? I could understand it when I was lame for two months this summer after I led a horse right over my foot. Once I could walk again, I was eager to get back in the swim of things, as it were. Throwing my back out on a sedate hike down a gravel road has undermined my confidence all out of proportion to the actual injury.
Of course, over and above all that, having learned to drive has softened me up considerably. I knew it would, but I bowed my head and gave in to the automobile. I frequently regret it.
I swore I'd walk everywhere I would have if I didn't have the car. But I didn't. I used to leave for work an hour early so I could detour through the cemetery on my way in, and get some exercise. Now I think twice before I walk to the library, which is about a ten minute round trip (not counting the time it takes to pick out the book.)
And snow? It annoyed me, but it didn't phase me.
My first winter in Madison I had to take my birth certificate to the Capitol to get a work permit to get an on-campus job. I bundled up good. Granny had given me an absurdly long scarf-of-many-colors for a going-away present, and I'd already learned it would wrap around my ears and over my cap, over my mouth and nose, and around my neck to keep me reasonably warm in the Wisconsin winter. I wore gloves, and layered a sweater under my wooly jacket. My high-school friends had decided it was a synthetic poodle fur coat. It looked like something a cave man would have worn, but it was quite warm, and I thought I was all set for the long walk.
I hadn't counted on the wind coming off Lake Menona. But I trudged across campus and down State Street, walking carefully on sidewalks slick with fresh snow, did my business, and trudged back, snow crusted on my cap and shoulders, my breath frozen in my scarf.
That was the coldest walk I ever took. In Carbondale winters
I'd think of it and quote the limerick I've seen attributed to
Kipling, among others:
"There was a young man of Quebec
Who fell in the snow to his neck.
When asked, "are you friz?"
He said, "I certainly is,
"But we don't call this cold in Quebec!"
The State Street trek was the coldest walk I ever took, but not the snowiest. That was one February in the late 70s, I think, when I trudged in to work at Hillside through beautiful fresh snow lying in drifts ranging from over my ankles to almost up to my knees. I didn't make a detour that morning! There was hardly any traffic, because the streets were in the same shape as the sidewalks. It was tiring, cold going, and I was half snow blind by the time I got there, looking forward to firing up the kerosene heater and seeing what the day would bring. There's something exhilarating about going out of your way to get to work on a day you know there won't be any customers, although I'm pretty sure we had roses to pot up for spring.
I had my head down, watching my footing, and I was half-way down the path that led from the gazebo at the parking lot to the store before I looked up. I stopped in my tracks when I saw the building, and started wondering who I'd ask for a phone to call my boss.
There was a drift as high as my chest across the front door. The building had a low roof, which was piled high with snow, and the general effect was of something out of the arctic wilderness of W. C. Fields' "The Fatal Glass of Beer," not Southern Illinois.
I walked incredulously on. I made a half-hearted swipe at the drift. Getting a load of snow up the wrist of my coat, I quickly decided there was a reason we'd invented the shovel. But all the tools were locked up in back, and even if there were less snow, I only had a key to the front.
Defeated, I turned back to use the phone across the street. My eye fell on the shed that sheltered the big bales of peat moss.
I'd forgotten that one of the other workers had left his shovel lying in the yard the night before. My boss had noticed it on the way out, after we'd already locked up the store, and tossed it into the peat moss shed with a rant that ended in "Never time to do it right, but always time to do it over!"
I took the shovel and dug my way in.
We left a shovel in the shed for the rest of that winter.
It took the city days to dig everybody out. I walked in and held down the fort while the other employees couldn't get out of their parking lots. Not only were the lots snowed in, but when the city got the streets ploughed, the snow from the streets choked the entrances and exits of the parking lots.
The footing got worse every day. When the city ploughed, my beautiful soft dreamlike snowfall was replaced by hard chunks of something more like ice. Then the path over the sidewalks got trampled hard, and it froze up slick overnight, with black slush thrown up from the cinder-strewn thoroughfare for good measure.
Once everyone else could get their cars out, I took a few days off.
Looking at that then and my now, I ask myself, "Where are the snows of yesteryear?"
And add to the question, "And where are the intrepid feet that braved them?"
By Ruby Jung. All rights reserved to the story. I made the background and you are welcome copy it and use it.