The Secret Life of Snowstorms

The Snowstorm

Chesapeake, Christmas Evening, 2010

“Silence in the terrible beauty of the snow and of the Sphinx and of the stars...”

(The Snowman by O. Henry)

The snow is falling, wrapping the landscape in a soft white cloak. In the morning we sleep late, snuggling deeper into our beds.  The highway is quiet, the alarm is silenced, and the bustling world of commerce, productivity, and motion is abruptly halted.  We have entered the altered dimension of snow time.

Life is restricted to our interior landscape; cooking in the kitchen, gazing out the windows, sitting by the fire and around the table, reading, and taking long naps under downy comforters.  Occasionally we take a walk through the neighborhood.  The snow takes us back to an older rhythm of life, when families lived in close proximity during the long winters and life had a slower, deeper pace.

“Housed and windowpaned from it, the greatest wonder to little children is the snow.”

(The Snowman by O. Henry)

When I was a child we made snow cream.  We scooped up enough clean snow to fill a big chilled bowl, and mixed it with a cup of whole milk or cream, a dash of vanilla, and sugar to taste, or just sweetened condensed milk and vanilla. Crushed frozen fruit or chocolate syrup could be added for the young snow gourmand.  Winter also brought the tradition of cutting intricate and elegant paper snowflakes out of folded paper that were taped to windows by loving mothers and teachers.  

The magic and joy of snow storms shine brightest when viewed from young eyes.  The Snowy Day, a wonderful Caldecott Classic by Ezra Jack Keats, shows how little Peter’s urban world in transformed by a big snowstorm.  Peter goes out to play and makes snow angels, a snowman, and then he pretends to be a mountain climber.  Peter tries to preserve some of the magical snow by carefully putting a snowball in his pocket.  The snow melts in the house during the night, but the next day brings fresh snow and happiness.  One of the most important picture books of the last century, The Snowy Day was a groundbreaking work when it debuted in 1964, and the book is credited with introducing multicultural images and characters to mainstream American children’s literature.  


Today, the Chesapeake Public Library catalog lists almost four hundred entries for children's books about snow, but snow has always been popular in stories for the young.  In 1812, the Brothers Grimm published a collection of seventy-four fairytales. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were studying and researching linguistics when they recorded and preserved many old folktales including Hansel and Gretel, Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Cinderella, the Frog Prince, and Snow White.

“Once upon a time in the middle of winter, when the snow flakes were falling like feathers from the sky, a queen sat at a window sewing, and the frame of the window was made of black ebony.  And whilst she was sitting and looking out the window at the snow, she pricked her finger with the needle, and three drops of blood fell upon the snow.  And the red looked pretty upon the white snow and she thought to herself, I wish that I had a child with skin as white as the snow, as red as the blood, and as black as the ebony wood of the window- frame.” 

Hans Christian Anderson brought us the story of the Snow Queen in 1848, often considered one of his finest stories.  The Queen of the snowflakes, or “snow bees” follows the snow fall around the world, but her palace is in the land of the permafrost.  Anderson also wrote The Snow Man in 1861. "It is so delightfully cold," said the Snow Man, "that it makes my whole body crackle. This is just the kind of wind to blow life into one."

In the Little House Books, Laura Ingalls Wilder describes family life during the 1800's on the northern prairies with long weeks sitting by the stove together sewing, doing lessons, and reading aloud while the snow piled up even with the second story window.  Her stories were my first glimpse into life in extreme Northern climates as she described a  Dakota winter where blizzard followed blizzard.

“But even after Laura was warm she lay there listening to the wind’s wild tune and thinking of each little house, in town, alone in the whirling snow with not even the light of the next house shining through. And the little town was alone in the wide prairie.  Town and prairie were lost in the wild storm which was neither earth nor sky, nothing but fierce winds and a white blankness.”  ( The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder)

Another wonderful family film and novel, LIttle Women, includes images of the snowy weather encapsulating the cozy family life of the March family. The author,  Louisa May Alcott, described one scene as, “....a little sketch of the four sisters, who sat knitting away in the twilight, while the December snow fell quietly without, and the fire crackled cheerfully within."  The March family were based on Louisa's own family, growing up without much money, but with a lot of love in the old Orchard House in snowy Massachusetts.

Snow represents a break from normality and routine, an alternate reality.  In the beloved children’s book The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, the door in the back of the wardrobe opens into a winter forest, blanketed in snow, alien and magical.  Even without the fantastical creatures, snow is suggestive of a fantasy world, and the pure, icy evil of the Snow Queen transfixes even the most worldly adult reader.

Without the distractions and stimulation of the modern world, family and winter life in the past centered around conversation, singing, storytelling, reading, and the endless emotional nuances of human relationships.  This rich interior life is captured cinematically in Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s beautiful movie, Fanny and Alexander, set in the early 1900's in a Swedish town.  The extravagantly detailed Victorian rooms, the sleighs filled with fur bundled families, and the intense emotions and colorful characters of family life are celebrated in the beautiful opening scenes of this film from the far North.  I thought of all these storied families over the holidays as my own family stayed home together, building roaring fires, playing Scrabble and making pots of tea while we marveled over the curtain of snow falling outside the windows.

I also thought of outside pleasures in the snow. Some of the loveliest walks of my life have been through snowy landscapes.   Particularly walking through forests of conifers where the boughs are swagged and  laden with snow.  Once wandering through a snowy pine forest I heard strange clattering sounds.  Following the noise I came to the edge of a small clearing where two large bucks, heads down, hooves stomping, battered their antlered heads against each other as fierce as any two warriors locked in mortal combat. I crouched watching through the trees for a long time.  The deer were oblivious to my presence, consumed with battle lust, hormones, and power.

Growing up we spent much of our time in or by the creek that ran through the woods near our home.  The moving water was endlessly fascinating in every season.  In winter the granite boulders were capped with white and ice, the waterfalls frozen into glassy sculptures, the water crusty with frozen ice begging to be broken.   

Although snow promises a chance for domestic bliss and leisurely strolls, it also offers extreme adventure, hardship, and survival stories.  If you decide that traveling the icy roads of Chesapeake are not sufficiently exciting, then reading about those intrepid souls who pit themselves against the most severe elements can be very entertaining.  There are many extraordinary books on polar explorers such as The Coldest March: Scott’s Fatal Antarctica Expedition by Susan Solomon or Admiral Richard Byrd's own account of his five months of dangerous and solitary survival in an observation camp in Antarctica entitled Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure.  

Photo: Frank Hurley

Another true story that has always fascinated me is the failed Ernest Shackleton Imperial Trans-Antartica Expedition between 1914 and 1917.  The ship, aptly named the Endurance, was crushed by ice packs, and the men were marooned for a year while Shackleton staged a heroic rescue by setting out in a lifeboat for help.  The tale is vividly brought to life by the astounding photographic record of Frank Hurley, who recorded the entire epic on fragile glass negatives. The photographs are haunting and awe inspiring, capturing the marooned men with their glittering eyes and frosted beards, the icebound ship reduced to a sculpture, and the  tiny figures juxtapositioned against the vast white wilderness.  Miraculously, they survived in the arctic landscape for a year and didn’t lose a single soul.  Somehow, united in the knife edge fight for survival, they fared better in the freezing wilderness than back in the civilized world, where alcohol and restless energy drove them to worst fates.

Photo: Frank Hurley

New Yorkers who found themselves stranded and angry in this snowstorm could gain perspective from one of the many historical accounts of the Great White Hurricane of March 1888.  Snowfalls of over four feet blanketed New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.  The weather stations recorded eighty miles per hour gusts and sustained winds of over forty five miles per hour, which resulted in average drifts of thirty feet covering the roofs of many houses, with the highest drifts up to fifty.  Engineers tried to ram trains through the drifts and only succeeded in burying entire cars and trapping passengers  for days.  The temperature averaged nine degrees the day of the storm. The entire Northeast seaboard was totally immobilized from Norfolk to Boston and over two hundred ships were sunk or grounded.


Ironically, it was the city dwellers, newly dependent on modern transportation such as street cars and trains, grocery stores, coal and milk delivery who suffered the most.  Most farming families weathered the storms with their wood piles, root cellars, and stocked provisions the same way humans have weathered blizzards for centuries.

Hundreds died from blizzard related accidents and from exposure.  The monster storm changed America forever, resulting in the construction of the New York subway system, burying underground electrical and telephone lines in New York City,  the establishment of the National Weather Bureau, and even new laws regulating trash collection because of all of the  incidents that resulted from debris blowing around the streets like missiles during the blizzard.  SInce this storm there have been other storms just as huge, but the experience and knowledge gleaned from each new weather event has helped us prepare for the next.

Although we are better prepared in the modern world, a big snow fall still promises a time out, a time to think, a time to remember when life was different.  The phrase “going north” is still a metaphor for solitude, loneliness, and quiet.  For space. For room to breathe. Let it snow.