Snow day
09/04/13 04:31
It looks like we’re going to get a snow day today. All Rapid City Area Schools are closed today and all after-school programs are cancelled. Western Dakota Technical Institute has cancelled all classes, including evening classes. I’m pretty sure that my 8:30 a.m. book study group won’t be meeting. It was my time to bring refreshments, so I’ll get to do that next week, which is no problem. We don’t have too many meetings scheduled for the church, but we’ll probably cancel our staff meeting scheduled for this morning. According to the National Weather Service, the snow could continue through the night tonight with a total accumulation of 6 to 15 inchers. Six inches of snow doesn’t really shut things down, but the wind is blowing pretty good at the moment and the drifts are piling up. It is only about 15 degrees out there right now, so the snow is behaving like winter snow instead of a spring blizzard. But the forecast is still calling for 50-degree temperatures by the end of the week, so it won’t be staying around very long.
We’re not technically snowed in. If there were an emergency, we could probably get out in the pickup truck without putting the chains on. If I had to put the chains on the truck, we have the ability to go in a lot of snow.
But it feels good to have a snow day. We’ll make a few phone calls, adjust the church web site and settle in at home for a day. We’ve got good books to read and a warm home.
Perhaps it is the memory loss that comes with my age, or perhaps it has just been enough years and I have gathered enough experiences that I don’t remember my childhood clearly, but I don’t really remember snow days from my growing up years. I lived in a small town. Almost everyone in town could walk to the school if the roads were clogged with snowdrifts. If the snowfall began at night, the school busses wouldn’t run and the kids who lived in the country wouldn’t be in, but school would proceed without them. If the storm started in the day, country kids usually stayed in the homes of kids from town. Each country kid had a blizzard family that would host that child in the event that the roads got too bad to make the journey home. Beyond that, I think that life pretty much went on as usual.
What I do remember with great joy is that when the drifts got deep, there were some great places to play in the snow. Up at the airport, the drifts in front of the hangers would get deep enough that we could dig tunnels and make snow caves. Sometimes the snow would get deep enough that they used a tractor to clear the drifts. Most of the time, it was our job to shovel things out if an airplane needed to be taken out before the drifts melted. Airport hill had lots of good places for sledding and you could get a really long ride if you started in just the right place. You had to know where the fences were except in the very rare occasions when the snow got so deep that you could ignore them.
But the world is different these days. Our towns and cities have spread out. The parking lots at the high schools in Rapid City demonstrate the number of youth who are dependent upon cars to get them to and from school. When school district officials make a decision on whether or not to cancel school, they have to take into consideration the impact of the traffic on the city as it works to get streets cleared.
Another difference that I notice is that many people have become very confident and reliant on cars that start and run in winter conditions. I routinely see youth rushing from cars to buildings without hats and scarves and even without coats. They are so confident that the car will be warm and the house will be warm that they venture out without what I consider to be proper winter clothing. We lived only a block from the school when I was a kid, but we really bundled up when we headed out. I’m sure that part of the reason we put on all of the clothing was that we loved playing outdoors. We waited until the last possible minute when the bell rang to head into the school building. There were all sorts of games that we played in the snow. The schoolyard was full of new adventures. Snow piled up around the swing set made for soft landings when jumping out of the swings. The slide was different when there was a drift of snow at its bottom. And we’d trample out a circle in the snow to play fox and chickens. Of course building snow forts and making snow balls was also worthy of as much of our time as we could get.
These days I am a bit less eager to venture out in the snow. I still love the snow and cold weather. And I have plenty of warm clothing so that I don’t worry about the cold. But snow means a bit of work. The driveway and walks need to be cleared, and that can take quite a bit of time, depending on how much snow there is. But even that chore is a kind of a treat. Most of the work I do to earn my living involves sitting indoors - sometimes in front of the computer, sometimes meeting face-to-face with others. Having chores that demand that I spend time out of doors is kind of nice. And, when we get heavy snow fall and the conditions are rough people understand that it takes us a while to get dug out.
At any rate, the conditions are perfect for a snow day today. I just finished a book about living above the Arctic Circle in Alaska. Perhaps I’ll find a book about a warmer place for today.