As this is written, it is 2 weeks since the groundhog saw his shadow. In those 2 weeks, the nation’s capital has had almost 5 feet of snow. By the time this can be read, several months later, the heaviest blizzard in a century will be a mellow memory and our aching backs will not be sore any longer.
This was a bad one. When the first storm started, we lost our electric power just after midnight. When I awoke, the inside of our house had a temperature of 40F. No furnace, no electric stove, no lights. A tree in my neighbor’s yard fell into our backyard, but it missed the power line. We got our power back in 30 hours. A quarter million people shared our dilemma. Only the neighborhoods with underground power lines avoided our chills. The second day of snow came with strong winds and clogged up the roads and driveways we had cleared from the first days. Two days later, the county snowplow made it down our residential street.
In other parts of our country, like Minnesota and New York State, 4 feet of snow is a common winter event. Those places are inhabited by people who know how to cope with snow and ice. They have the equipment to clear the streets and sidewalks and parking lots so that life can go on. Most of those places have electric power and wiring in shape to resist the wrath of their snowstorms. So the electric thermostat keeps the furnace running and the rooms bright and cheerful.
During the Cold War years, it was a running gag that if the Russians wanted to take charge of Washington, they should pick a time when we have 4 inches of snow. Even if they tried, the Russians would have been trapped in traffic jams on every street, long lines to check out food in the groceries, and the subway train stopping where it ran out of the tunnels and into snow banks piled over the rest of the route.
Where I grew up in a small mid-southern town, we had some snow most winters. But we never had as much as a foot. Within a day or two, it melted. We heated most of our houses with coal stoves; no thermostats. And we kept kerosene lamps for the rare times when we lost our electric power. I had a sled. Mostly, I used it to deliver newspapers on my route when I could not ride my bicycle. Cars packed down the snow on the roads. So along I walked in galoshes, my wool cap crammed down by my eyebrows and a scarf wrapped inside of my one warm coat.
When I went to graduate school in Wisconsin, I thought it would be exciting to experience a real winter. The streams and lakes froze so thick that people could drive trucks on them. I learned to ice skate. There was enough snow for those who wanted to ski. I was told that I had experienced a fairly mild winter, except that the thermometer dangled well below zero for several weeks.
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