Last week’s crazy storm got me thinking about snow. This is the fourth winter in a row – so far – that we have not had significant snowfall in this neck of the woods. Growing up in south Louisiana, snow was rare and wonderful, palm trees and Spanish moss dusted white. Snow makes anything look magical – rooftops, woods, meadows, mountains. Frozen waterfalls on Ozark bluffs are pretty cool, too.
One winter I was housesitting my aunt’s place in Washington, DC. I arrived the day of the big storm, during which an airliner skidded off the runway into the Potomac. People used cross-country skis to travel down her street. I attended a rally on the Mall; the Smithsonian Castle and the Capitol snow-covered, the giant trees drooping under white stuff. The event, during the Reagan years, was to campaign to make Martin Luther King’s birthday a national holiday. The a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, led by civil rights activist Berniece Johnson Reagon (no relation to Ronnie) sang passionately, and Stevie Wonder performed his “Happy Birthday” song for Dr. King. Thousands of people stood in the snow, in that spectacular setting. It may have been the year the legislation finally passed.
We relocated to rural Carroll County in 2008, then the wettest year on record. Kings River was only a few feet below the Grandview bridge, overrunning its banks onto the wooded bottomland, a scenario that repeated several times. Late summer the remnants of two different hurricanes came meandering up this way, dropping six inches of rain each.
Midwinter came the ice storm, a disaster unlike anything I had ever witnessed. Eight days with no electricity, the incredible silence interrupted by tree limbs cracking under the weight of all that ice. We melted three-foot long icicles on the woodstove to have water for washing up.
The following winters we had regular snowfalls, sometimes several inches stayed on the ground for days. Like my students, I enjoyed multiple days home when the roads were too sketchy to run school buses. One year we had 21 snow days, and the state of Arkansas had to grant a waiver for ten of them. I used to say, “if we can get out of our driveway, we can get to town,” and that was mostly true.
Alas, them days are just memory. If we get a light coating of sleet covered with a quarter-inch of snow, it’s dangerous to walk onto the porch, except it melts off when temperatures return to the 50s next day.
The first time I heard the stupid comment that “we could use some of that global warming” was from a high school science teacher, during an actual cold spell. The next time was from our president, when a blizzard blasted the Northeast.
Somehow, some people cannot understand the difference between weather and climate. It’s possible that wet years (like this one) and extreme weather (droughts, blizzards, ice storms) are in the Ozarks record books, a regression to the mean that justifies our belief that we enjoy generally moderate weather patterns.
Last week’s storm caused havoc from Louisiana (deadly tornadoes) into Michigan (heavy winds, snow). We were fortunate to get lots of rain, a little snow and some gusty winds, before a return to this mild winter. Somehow the Ozarks Plateau is not hammered like the great plains, the upper midwest, southeast or New England.
We hope we will not see fires such as are incinerating much of Australia and California. We are far enough inland that those giant slow-motion hurricanes won’t drown us; island countries and coastlines worldwide are increasingly at risk from tropical deluge. We don’t have melting glaciers in our backyard, or sea ice turned to water, or permafrost that is no longer perma.
We seem relatively safe here. But it could be an illusion. Mark Twain is credited with the quip that “everyone complains about the weather but nobody does anything about it.” Unfortunately, humankind, especially well-to-do countries, is doing too much – climate change amplifies the frequency and power of extreme weather events. The meek shall not inherit the earth.