The Winter's Tale

It's winter in Massachusetts. OK, so it isn't North Dakota. It could be worse. But still. I was not built for this.

I grew up in Northern California, first in the San Francisco Bay Area and then in the Sacramento Valley. My notion of "really cold" back then was when the temperature got down into the upper thirties (F) for a few days in February. Once or twice a year we might even get a thin layer of ice on the rain puddles over night, which was sort of exciting. Snow didn't come to me, except for a few extremely rare occasions when a quarter inch or so would fall. For the most part, I had to go to visit snow if I wanted to see it, for example by taking the occasional trip to go skiing in the Tahoe area.

My first real brush with "proper" winter was when I moved to Mainz, Germany in 1984. My Future Wife (that is, My Favorite Wife before she became a government-certified Wife) and I had rented a small, two-room apartment in an old house. There was no central heating. Instead, in each room there was a little stand-alone oil heater. These oil heaters were crude devices consisting of a burner that was a cast-iron cylinder about eight inches in diameter and two feet high, which was connected to a little supply line that fed oil to the burner from a tank that held something like 8 liters (that's about two gallons in real money). There was a metal stovepipe that connected the contraption to a chimney that went up through the center of the house behind a wall.

To generate heat, you opened a valve that let a little heating oil dribble into the burner chamber and opened the metal lid of the burner. Then you attempted to ignite it using these things that were sort of like a strip of thin cardboard soaked in wax, which you lit with a match and then dropped onto the little puddle of oil. Opening the lid of the burner would cause a draft through the burner and up the chimney, which would frequently cause the igniters to go out before the oil caught fire. Once you finally got a flame you closed the lid and tried to keep the oil flowing enough to generate some heat. When the tank was empty, you had to make a trip to a big tank in the cellar to get more. It was pretty primitive technology, and not particularly effective either.

That first winter that I was there we had a stretch of two weeks or so of temperatures of about -4˚ F. Those crappy oil heaters were strong enough to raise the temperature in the apartment to maybe the mid-sixties (F) during the regular winter weather, but with those freezing cold temperatures outside, the temperature inside our apartment remained just barely above freezing. We spent a lot of time in pubs and restaurants that winter. That part I liked; the coming home afterward part, not so much. But at least I survived to tell you this story.

I spent more than a dozen subsequent winters in Mainz, though mostly in living quarters that had modern heating of one kind or another. It definitely got colder on average than in my California homeland, and a couple of times each winter it would snow somewhere between two and six inches. But much of the winter the weather would kind of hover just above the freezing point, with rain or, more often than not, a kind of unending gray drizzle weather. Coupled with our relatively northern latitude, which in the depths of winter meant that it didn't really get light until about 9 AM and was dark again by 4 PM, I found that climate increasingly maddening as the winters wore on. I was always relieved when spring finally came.

MFW would always say she wanted to live in a place that had "real" winter, by which she meant icy cold and lots of snow, the kind of weather that prevailed in southwestern Germany when she was little (and which seems to have returned in recent years). I'm not so crazy about cold, but even real cold and snow seemed preferable to that interminable drizzle. Then came our move to Massachusetts. Boy, were we surprised! A classic example of the "be careful what you wish for" phenomenon.

Those sub-zero temperatures I suffered through that first winter in Mainz aren't so common here, but they're not that uncommon either. We might get a stretch of those kinds of temperatures in February pretty much any year. But mostly it stays in the twenties and teens during the day, colder at night, for much of the winter. After suffering a lot for the first few years I finally got somewhat acclimated, to the point that if the temperature gets up above freezing during January or February, reaching the same temperatures that I thought were bone-chillingly cold back in my years in the Golden State, I will find myself describing the weather as "not so cold today". As they say, it's all relative.

I learned a lot about snow my first couple of years in Massachusetts. In Mainz snow was occasional enough to be fun. In two of the three places I lived there was a building superintendant who cleared the snow for the residents, and in the third I only had to clear it once or twice from the 20 feet or so of sidewalk in front of the building, so snow wasn't much of a bother to me, logistically speaking. Not so in my new homeland. Snow and I became well acquainted.

I learned that there are lots of different kinds of snow and snowfall. Now I understand that the story that Eskimos have numerous different words to describe specific kinds of snow is probably accurate. Mostly snow can be characterized by its moisture content. At one end of the spectrum is the dry, fluffly stuff that tends to fall when the air is cold and dry. That's the stuff that's light and easy to shovel, even when you get a lot of it. At the other end is the wet, heavy snow you get when the temperature is higher and there's a lot of moisture in the air already. Even four or five inches of that stuff is a real pain to shovel, but it sticks together well for making snowmen, snowballs, snowforts, snowcastles, snowcathedrals, snowstadiums, snow… sorry, got carried away.

Another thing I learned about snow is that if it's someplace where you don't want it, get rid of it quickly. If you let it sit on your sidewalk or your driveway, walking or driving over it compacts it pretty quickly and you end up with ice that requires a lot of hard work to remove. I discovered this the hard way after the first big snowfall I experienced here. The house we lived in had a garage that was at the bottom of a short but steep driveway and after the first big snow I failed to shovel immediately. It didn't take more than a couple of days before I found my garage connected to the street by something resembling an ice rink that had been installed on about a 35˚ incline. It turned the process of getting the car into or out of the garage into a pretty hair-raising adventure.

Navigating a snowy cityscape is kind of an adventure, too. The "winter wonderland" feeling is nice right after the snow, but it quickly gives way to a landscape of grey goop, the result of people walking and driving through the snow. It doesn't look all that charming and it sticks to everything, so you try to avoid walking in it. You learn to be careful about stepping off the curb to cross the street, because that innocent-looking layer of snow just off the curb is probably not what it seems; in all likelihood it is just a thin layer of snow floating on top of a soup of road salt and melted snow. You learn this by stepping onto what you thought was solid ground and instead finding yourself ankle-deep in freezing-cold muck. If you have to cross a downtown street a day or two after a big snow, your choice is usually between either trying to leap from the curb onto the asphalt beyond these innocently disguised puddles, which invariably collect at the streetcorners, or taking your chances by clambering up and over the piles of grey goop that have been deposited along the side of the road by the snowplows and trying to venture through traffic to cross in the middle of the street.

As I write this, we are recovering (both figuratively and literally) from the second major snowstorm of the season. The first that came at the end of December left us with around 15 inches of snow. This one gave us another 15-18 inches. It's hard to say how much it was exactly because it was blowing around a lot all night. In the front of the house it was around 15-16" but behind the house it was a good two feet or so in a lot of spots.

This snowstorm was a classic "nor'easter". I love that name because saying it makes me feel like such a New Englander. I can stalk around the house yelling things like, "Pull up the lahbstuh traps, sonny, and let's head fuh hahbuh! When that noaw'eastuh hits it'll be snowin' wicked hahd!" The actual storm: not so great, because it usually means there's going to be a lot of shoveling to do.



The Calm Before the Storm

Still Calm Before the Storm

This one arrived sometime after midnight, accompanied, as is occasionally the case, by a lot of lightning and thunder between about 4 and 6 AM. A nighttime lightning storm is pretty spectacular against a backdrop of pure white. I wasn't so crazy about being unable to sleep from around 4 AM, though, because of the constant loud thunder.

Around noon the snow was still falling, but lightly, so I ventured out to start cleaning up. I didn't want to wait until the snow was over completely, because it was hard to know when that might be, plus it was still a workday and I had some conference calls scheduled for later in the afternoon. Better to get the bulk of it cleared away then, even if I might have to go out to clear the remainder away later, when it would be dark already.


Calm Once Again, But Get Out Your Shovel

For many years I did my digging out the old-fashioned way, using a shovel. If the snow was light and fluffy, it was tedious to clear but not too strenuous, and I could be done in about two hours or so even after one of those twelve-inch storms that usually come 2-3 times each winter. If the snow was wet and heavy, it might take me that long to do five or six inches, or less time only if I could get MFW to come out and help me. If the snow was both deep and heavy with moisture, I might employ a combination of threats and promises to get the offspring to pitch in.

Last year I decided to finally join the jet age and buy a snow blower. I had balked for a long time, partly because I didn't want to part with the $500-600 it costs to buy even a simple two-stage snow blower (single-stage snow blowers are cheaper, but don't do the job all that well, as one of my neighbors learned). The other reason I had hesitated was because those things are pretty big and I didn't want to be tripping over it on the 360 or so days of each year that I wasn't actually using it. But the year before last we had a lot of storms bringing a lot of heavy snow, and I was finding my lower back hurt more and more after each one, so I resolved that I was going to hang up my shovel in favor of more advanced technology.

The Inevitable March of Progress 

Even with the machine, clearing the snow from this storm still took me a good two hours. It was around 15" of the wet, heavy stuff and I shudder to think of how long I would have been out there with just a shovel, and how much my back would have ached afterward. I'm not getting any younger, you know.

Hmm, Turns Out They Did Deliver The Paper Today!

[Editor's note: Observant readers may be asking themselves, "What's that contraption on Charlie's head?" He wants you to know that it's the special headset he uses to receive orders from his home planet.]

So... Following my usual pattern, I cleared the front porch, the walkways all around the house, the driveway, the path to the compost pile and bird feeders. And then it was time for… THE WALL.

Now I need to tell you something about the friendly snowplow. The snowplow is nice because it clears the road so I can get my car to work or to the grocery store so that I can keep the economy nice and stimulated. This isn't D.C. or Atlanta, where a few inches of snow result in absolute pandemonium and paralysis. A few hours after the snow's over the main roads are clear, and in less than half a day even my little sidestreet is driveable again. The snowplowing system is pretty effective.

But all that snow has to go somewhere. Mr. Snowplow Driver is getting paid to move the snow off the road, and he really doesn't care where he puts it, and there aren't a whole lot of places he can put it. So he spends the day driving up and down the streets of the neighborhood, progressively shoving the snow further and further off the roadbed and up onto the side of the road, in a pile that grows progressively higher with each pass. He also can't be bothered to shift the plow blade a little as he approaches your driveway, so that same pile is going to be at the end of your driveway, too. The stuff he scrapes up from the road is going to be full of road salt that will keep it at the consistency of a kind of thick, salt-flavored Slurpee (or Icee, if you prefer those), and it will be well compacted by the blade. Removing it will be a little like shoveling wet cement that has almost set. Even with a machine to help you, you may be out there for an hour or more just dealing with that. You also need to remember to move it to the right of your driveway (as you face the street), because if you throw it to the left, the snowplow is going to push at least some of it back into your driveway if it comes through again.


Here's That Load of Frozen Gunk You Ordered, Sir

The snowplow has another negative side effect, which is that the blade tends to contribute to the early demise of the road. As the pavement ages and tiny cracks develop in it, water seeps in and, during our cold winter, freezes overnight, then thaws a little during the daytime, then freezes the next night, day after day after day, progressively expanding the cracks, until they reach the point where the jagged edges stick up above the surface enough that the snowplow blade catches them and rips out big chunks of asphalt, forming potholes which continue to deepen as the winter wears on.  Those asphalt chunks, incidentally, will also become one more component of the wall of crud at the end of your driveway.

In the spring, the city will send a team of six jokers with shovels and a wheelbarrow full of asphalt; five of them will lean on their shovels and smoke while the sixth uses his shovel to tamp some of that asphalt into the potholes, effecting a repair that will last for about fifteen minutes. After around ten years of this you will wonder if you have blundered into one of the poorer neighborhoods of Mogadishu as you drive down your otherwise quiet suburban street. Then one fine day a proper construction crew will show up with a lot of really big and complicated-looking machines and repave your street, and the cycle will begin anew. This is called "the circle of life". Elton John wrote a song about it.


Entering the Home Stretch


The wall I had to remove after this particular storm was around three feet tall (although it's a little hard to see from the angle of the picture above). My neighbor across the street (he of the wimpy single-stage snow blower) has it a little harder because his driveway is on the outside edge of a curve in the street. I'm not so sure how the geometry of the street works so much to his disadvantage, but somehow he always ends up with a pile that's another 30-40% higher than mine, and a bit wider at the base as well. He's an older guy who has some physical disabilities, so when I get through with my own house I usually go over and help him clear his place out. This time he had a wall about four and a half feet high (and almost that wide at the base) to be removed, so that was jolly good fun (not).

Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall

By the time I finished clearing everything, a final inch or two had fallen, so I had to go over everything one last time. I was glad to finally put all the equipment away, step into a warm house, take off my coat and gloves that were now soaked with freezing cold, semi-melted snow, pour myself a beer (yes, a cold one, ironically enough) and contemplate retiring to California.

Free At Last! (Mostly)