ByGeorge! Online

Feb. 19, 2002

EDITORIAL
Snow Lines

Exploring the Relationship with Snow and Winter

By Bernard Mergen

Snow, falling from a gray winter sky, can literally stop us in our tracks and make us think about who we are and where we’re going. Frozen particles of water, translated by the human eye and mind into snowflakes, trigger one of life’s periodic reality checks. A cold smack upside the head disguised as a friendly push with a fuzzy cold mitten.

It might be fashionable now to describe snowflakes as computer chips packed with data about atmospheric temperatures, humidity, air currents, and microorganisms. Each crystal is a little transistor full of electrical energy. Each is a lesson in fractals, each a map of a kingdom with animals, vegetables, and minerals. These and other fanciful analogies occur to me each time I see and feel snow fall.

My walks in snow began more than 60 years ago on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada where the winter snowpack is “white gold” providing water needed for the following year, and have continued over most of North America and three other continents. There may be identical snowflakes, but no two snow journeys are the same.

A few years ago, in mid-June, my wife and I stepped into a blowing snowstorm from a sturdy MIAT jet that landed us in a yak pasture in northern Mongolia. On our jeep ride to Lake Hovsgul we were startled to see Hooded Cranes (Grus leucogeranus) in the nearby woods, standing firmly on their thin legs, waiting out the storm. They were probably as astonished to see other bipeds, feathered in down parkas, as we were to see them, but they concealed their amusement.

Two other desert snows stand out in my memory. On the Fourth of July, in the heart of the South African winter, I was near the foot of Rhino Peak, a 10,000-foot mountain near the border with Lesotho. I could see snow in the distance, but found none as I hiked to look for the Bushman caves with their graceful paintings of animals. I wandered for most of the day, enjoying the high barren landscape so much like Nevada’s. Then I noticed that the sun was setting and I had lost the trail. As I sat on a rock trying not to panic, I saw snow. It was probably frost, but clinging to the branches of the small bushes near a stream were the stellar scouts for the distant snows. Seeing these familiar crystals was energizing. I had compulsively learned the Zulu word for snow, ighwa, and a few fragile flakes were my reward. I trudged back to my hotel renewed.

A little less than two years later I was walking along Nevada State Route 157 on Mt. Charleston in the Toiyabe National Forest near Las Vegas, looking for a place to begin cross-country skiing. Snow clung to the sagebrush and piñon pine like tissues. Snow blossoms or tourist roses? Nature imitating culture. As I left the highway, struggling across the ditch that separates macadam’s paradise from Adam’s, the snow became deeper, cleaner, harder.

From the car window at 50 miles an hour this snow looked soft and new. Up close it was pitted with little holes made when a dark pine cone or even a seed absorbed heat from the sun and melted through the crust of the snow. I broke a trail below the Lee Canyon ski area, where the downhill runs are called “The Line,” “The Strip,” and “Bimbo.” The glow of neon signs from Las Vegas was an aurora australis in the early evening as I glided past islands of cholla and creosote bush in an ocean of snow. A coyote barked a greeting and disappeared.

Snow is a cosmic joke; water masquerading as solid hexagons, needles, and columns; Lego blocks for building snowmen and snowforts; and putty for sculpting. Snowballs are paragons of all spheres. As demiurgi we mold and hold and throw, creating and destroying snow. It’s an old story, the one about a snowman who comes to life and frolics with its sculptor, but melts when invited indoors. Snow reminds us that nature can be transfigured, but not transubstantiated.

I was doing lots of figuring and transfiguring at the Department of Agriculture Soil Conservation Service’s West-Wide Snow Survey Training School on Mt. Bachelor, OR. About 50 water resource managers; soil, range, and forest conservationists from the SCS, the Forest Service, and the Bureau of Reclamation; Weather Service meteorologists; municipal water department employees; and one historian were being taught snow surveying, winter camping, and avalanche hazards and rescue. As part of our final exam we had to build snow shelters and spend the night on the mountain. For three hours the forest rang with clanking shovels, thwacking axes, and exclamations. One skillful young woman, an experienced Forest Ranger, constructed a snow igloo better than Nanook’s. The rest of us settled for a trench dug in the snow, lined with pine branches, and covered with a plastic tarp with snow added for insulation. The pits and mutilated branches made me think of the first attempts of our ancestors to trap mammoths. I drew a crude George Washington University flag to identify my hovel.

Snow is dangerous stuff, but it can also bring tranquility to the city. Behind my Capitol Hill row house is a vacant lot, its lush vegetation of common cocklebur, goldenrod, ragweed, dandelion, jimsonweed, ladysthumb, pigweed, swamp smartweed, fox tail, broomsedge, sweet pea, daffodils, and ailanthus (the familiar “parking lot palm”) reduced in winter to scattered brown and yellow stalks, some with broken stems and dried whorls. As snow creates patches of white amid this in-town tundra, it paints an Andrew Wyeth-like scene of burnished gold flecked with silver. A crown for the earth in a city established by attempted regicide. When enough snow falls to cover the discarded bottles and, finally, the broken and abandoned furniture, the lot reverts to wilderness. Marching on trident feet, birds are the first to invade. They scour the lot, then leave it to the midnight rites of opossums and feral cats whose paw prints will be followed the next day by children in search of adventure, and the pageant of civilization begins anew.

Bernard Mergen, professor of American Civilization, is the author of the book, “Snow in America”

 

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