Snow

An Essay by Gil French

 

Snow is one of nature’s most spectacular displays. It’s hard to believe that its breathtaking landscape of widespread virginal purity is made of tiny fragile frozen particles that can land on one’s face or hands without being felt. The haughty science textbooks inform us that each flake is a unique hexagon with highly intricate internal structure. I am not sure that I believe them. I have looked often and with deep concentration but they have always melted before I can determine their inner secrets, I wonder how the classy scientists have managed to keep them frozen while they magnify their innards. But, so they report, snowflakes are individually spectacularly beautiful and can elicit demonic outpourings of wonder and delight.

A single snowflake is so light that it takes 3,642 of them to weigh a single ounce. An ounce of snowflakes occupies a volume that would encompass about three cubic inches. The city of Baltimore covers about 81,000 square miles. An ounce of a three inch snowfall covers about one square inch. Perhaps one of you, dear readers, if you feel underworked and have too much leisure time on your hands, might like to calculate the number of snowflakes it would take to cover the city to a depth of three inches (hint, it would take about 142,114,000,000,000,000,000, plus or minus a few – that’s one hundred forty two quintillion, one hundred fourteen quadrillion snowflakes, plus or minus the same few mentioned above!)

Please don’t use the figure above as fact. I made up the number of snowflakes it takes to weigh a single ounce, but it seems reasonable to me and until someone has the patience, desire and leisure to count and report the number in an ounce I will accept my figure as fact. If you, dear reader, feel the urge to count them, try not to hold them in your hand as you do. They have a short shelf-life in an environment of 98.6⁰. At any rate, that is a lot of snowflakes. Remember that each one is uniquely fashioned by nature

Not only is each one fashioned by nature but, so the brilliant scientists tell us, each one is different from all of the others. I find this hard to believe. Look back, please, dear reader, at the figures so numerous and so painfully and carefully produced in the paragraphs above. I think it’s not possible for that staggering number of items to be different, each from all of the others. There just aren’t that many shapes.

A heavy snowfall produces a feeling of ecstatic delight in young children. It means that they will have a day free of school and other annoying obligations and it will allow them to use their sleds and snowboards followed by relaxing in a warm kitchen eating cookies and drinking hot chocolate. Athletic adults, on the other hand, envision a holiday of skiing followed by relaxing in a warm tavern drinking fortified beverages and enjoying the company of fellow snow-lovers, boasting of their skills at skiing and avoiding death and other discomforts and injuries, all while administering to their broken bones.

While a snowfall produces a very lovely landscape it does not spread its virtues equally among those upon whom it falls. The hapless homeowner, for example, begins, as the very first lovely snowflake makes its appearance, to calculate how many snowflakes he will have to remove from his sidewalk and driveway. Of course, if he had the wisdom and foresight to marry a hearty, healthy and willing spouse his worries quietly vanish. Alternatively, if he and his hearty, healthy wife had the foresight to produce hearty, healthy children, and if they both could convince their hearty, healthy children to arouse themselves from their natural lethargy and teen-age stupor, they might convince them to do the work. Some wives refuse and, of course, all teenagers have serious work allergies so nearly all such efforts fail and the gentleman home owner ends up picking up the snow shovel. Uttering a few teeth-curling invectives he begins to shovel snow in a very bad mood.

But snow-shoveling isn’t the only downside to snowstorms. It turns out that the striking beauty of the landscape turns out to be extremely short-lived. Automobiles, it seems, are rather dirty devices that leave behind them ugly, filthy particles that cover the roads, the sidewalks and the lungs, all things that people tend to use. As with the sidewalks and lungs, those roads are very rarely scrubbed and polished. So the snow that is cleared by the snowplows uncovers a filthy black layer that ends up on top of the snow that has been cleared from the roadway. This along, with the salt dumped with generous abundance, turns the pure snow into hideous, unwashed slush. In addition not only does the plowed snow look hideous but the snowplow leaves it piled high in the very roadway where the homeowner has parked his car. Furthermore, the piles of such befouled snow that are left after the shoveling and plowing will adorn the sidewalks and streets in which they are placed for weeks. Truly, the innocent delight we may feel in the chaste and lovely new fallen snow fades quickly and leaves those who so recently celebrated its arrival teeming with resentment and bitterly impatient for its soggy departure.

In the end, however, we can love or hate snow, welcome or despise its presence or open our arms to it or shake our fists at it but nature doesn’t care, it will do as it likes regardless.