Since moving away from Central New York thirteen years ago, I have not had occasion to strap on my snowshoes even once. As I write this, there is no snow on the ground in New Haven and we really have not had any snow to speak of this season. While I don’t miss the chore of clearing the driveway, I do miss the beauty and silence of really deep snow; country roads that are smoother and wider in winter after the plow goes through than they are in the summer; kicking down a steep, powdery slope in six-foot strides, all the way to the bottom in seconds instead of slowly and awkwardly clambering down the same slope one gingerly foothold at a time through summer’s brambles; the challenge of clearing the driveway and the parking area in front of the old barn with Gerald, Our Ford and a backblade, spending hours twisted around on a metal seat, pushing snow in reverse gear; warming up by the woodstove afterward with a cup of hot chocolate made from scratch. Ah, youth!
If you are free to pick the place you live based on the sort of natural disaster it’s most prone to, snow country seems more benign than tornado, hurricane, flood, forest fire, mudslide, volcano, or earthquake country. But that’s just my opinion, and you are certainly entitled to your own.
1 comment:
"If you are free to pick the place you live based on the sort of natural disaster it’s most prone to, snow country seems more benign than tornado, hurricane, flood, forest fire, mudslide, volcano, or earthquake country. But that’s just my opinion, and you are certainly entitled to your own."
It's more than opinion -- it's a fact, at least in New England. Weather phenomena are as much about location-location-location as anything else. New England does not sit on active faults; is moist most of the time so not prone to wildfires; is the wrong place to be affected by certain airmass violence; etc. The region does suffer floods, hurricanes, blizzards, and tornadoes, but any of these on the Seriously Destructive scale come around on a decade or generational basis. What we trade for this relative physical security is weather, weather, weather. Constantly changing, unpredictable weather, and many months worth of cold, ice, and short days. Small price to pay for not worrying about having several thousand miles worth of environment and/or infrastructure creamed by violent meteorological events!
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