Snow is an animate thing. No two snowfalls are alike. At times the snow that accumulates in my backyard is achingly heavy. It is like shoveling water. At other times it is downy light, like shoveling feathers. The best scenario is when the sidewalk is warm and the snow melts upon arrival. Then I can enjoy the wintery scene without resorting to the snowblower. This is how the snow is today, March 3, 2022. Yesterday’s temperature hovered around sixty degrees. The sun shined and a warm wind blew from the southwest.
I have lived here long enough to know two things: One – There are several desperate snowstorms in March and April; Two – I should leave Chicago in February. The first is a given. The second is advice I often neglect.
On January 26 & 27, 1967 Chicago lived through the mother of all snowstorms. The record 23 inches of snow paralyzed the city. Back then, for a kid like me it was a great adventure. I spent the two days not in school but outside getting into all kinds of mischief. The worst of which was skitching. For those not in the know, it is crouching to grab a passing bumper (then chrome) and hitching a ride. This is akin to reckless skateboarding but of course I had never heard of a skateboard. A few of the city’s garbage/plow trucks even let us hang on while they slowly navigated the streets.
My next remembrance of snow affecting my life and well being was in the early seventies. Now in my twenties I was gainfully employed by the USPS as a Letter Carrier or as we were known back then, mailmen. My beat for three winters was the idyllic suburbs of Winnetka and Northfield. Throughout the 70’s it seemed we were approaching another ice age. The snow would begin in November as the temperature plunged below freezing and relent its hold in April. Never melting, the snow piled high.
I could not see out of my garden apartment windows for months on end. It was brutal. The only thing moving on the side streets somedays were snowmobiles. A friends low slung Porsche laid quietly under a snow bank until the spring thaw.
After the third winter spent outside, I determined it was time to move south and return to school. Southern Illinois University offered an affordable tuition and at 400 miles south, a respite from Chicago’s weather. I marveled at how disrupted the locals would get by snow that was trivial to me.
I will only bore you kind people with one more tale. Much of my medical training was conducted 40 miles south of my home in Olympia Fields. This was a foreign place. The medical center was in the middle of fallow corn fields. As this was before medical education reform, many memorable days and nights were spent there. Eighty hour weeks were not unusual. At sixish the day would begin and end (if not on call) at 5:30 when night call started.
One winter’s night I was on call. This meant I had worked all day and then had the next 12 hours to look forward to. I was more or less in charge of a floor of sick people; It was terrifying. At one point, while I examined a patient, I glanced out the window. The snow was falling heavier and heavier. It was moving horizontally across the parking lot as the wind steadily increased.
Travel ceased, the hospital grew quiet and then the power failed. The lights dimmed and flickered for a few seconds before the generators kicked in and turned on the emergency lighting. The hospital became even more quiet and I knew I was in for the long haul.
I was in the habit of sleeping, when it was possible to sleep, with my clothes on. What was the point of disrobing when the pager (remember those) was nearly never quiet. I had taken to sleeping in the newly constructed and so far, uninhabited obstetrics unit. The accommodation mimicked a nice hotel room, and I did not have to share it with the mouse family that lived in the intern’s quarters.
I woke up to another day but without the usual faces. Me and a few other interns were on our own. Thirty six hours later I was on my way home. Snow, thick heavy intractable snow, had cost sixty hours of my life.
It is snowing harder now. The snowflakes are coalescing into distinct entities. In my backyard the blue spruce’s limbs are beginning to droop with the snow’s weight. The snow has matched the sidewalk’s ability to melt it, and soon I will be forced to use one of the new blue plastic snow shovels I bought on a whim in December.
This will not be a memorable snowstorm. TV weather folk will not name it or be forced to stand out in the blizzard yelling into the microphone to be heard. It will be just another reason for people to move to Florida and further depopulate the north. I will stick with the snow . . . as long as I can have February off!
March 2022
