Editorial 5.11, December 2003, by Deirdre Helfferich ...and it snew uphill both ways! Blizzards were something to see when I was a child. I grew up on Ester Dome Summit, in the days before the state plowed the road. We had a Land Rover with a big yellow V-plow, and sometimes, even with that formidable instrument to clear a path, the drifts were just too big. It used to get to fifty below every winter, and snowed so much before the big cold that we’d get snowed in every Thanksgiving. The guests would stay and play Monopoly until they couldn’t stand it anymore and HAD to dig themselves out. One winter night it was snowing so hard my dad and I almost got creamed by a train on Sheep Creek Road—my father stopped the car just before the tracks because he couldn’t see them, and he knew they were coming up soon. This was before they put the big flashing lights and barriers that swing down as the train passes. I remember sitting there with my father, the car running while he sat behind the wheel and peered into the white static in the headlights. He decided to get out, just to check, and when he opened the door we could suddenly hear the roar of the train as it clanged and rumbled by. My father continued to move out of the car, closing the door and walking forward just into the headlight beam, standing in the snowstorm as the train, not six feet away, continued past unseen. Later he told me he still couldn’t see it until he had actually walked up to within arm’s length of it. That was a blizzard. I remember another time when I went outside to play and decided to go past the saddle to where the Ullrhaven was (a big eight-sided ski lodge on the dome, for all you latecomers). I walked up our driveway (we drolly named it Styx River Road, for all the reasons you might imagine), bundled in mittens, boots, parka, lots of socks and scarves and hats and other assorted clothing, to be met by a stiff wind and snowstorm that made it hard to see and feel more than a little nippy. However, I was a bit stubborn in those days and decided that, wind or no, I WAS going to conquer the saddle and at least go up to the ski lodge to see what I could see. It was kind of fun, plowing through the drifts up to my belly, sliding down the other side, climbing up the next one. I had a good time, but when I got to where I should have been able to see the valley, all that was visible was this rather boring whiteness. I could sort of see a grayer whiteness off to my right, which I figured was the ski lodge. My toes were getting cold by this time, so, mission accomplished, I turned around to head home. Blam! Snow and wind full bore in my face, and it was COLD. And I couldn’t see the road. There was so much snow in the air that I couldn’t tell where the edges of the road were, nor which direction I had come from, exactly. I was in a whiteout, or close to it, and it was getting blurrier all the time. The wind had been at my back, mostly, on the way to the ski lodge, but it had gotten gustier as I’d gone along, and now the wind kept changing direction and kicking up snow so that I could only see about ten feet or less in front of me. Sometimes I couldn’t see at all, because the wind blew snow in my eyes. I was young, but I knew that this could be very serious even though I was close to home. I knew it could be very easy to get disoriented, so I stood there in the wind with my head down and thought for a minute about what to do. Maybe I should go hide under the ski lodge? At least I’d be out of the wind. The building was probably locked, so I wouldn’t be likely to get in it. I turned around again to check where it was—nope, couldn’t tell anymore. It was just all sort of whitish, and beginning to get darker. The sun was going down—somewhere. I decided that even though I’d probably find the lodge, as it wasn’t far away, I really wanted to go home and warm up my feet. I hadn’t moved from where I stood, so I turned around again (brr!) and discovered that I could still see my tracks, although they were getting filled in. So I trudged along, following my tracks, and believe me, it wasn’t nearly as much fun this time climbing over those drifts. I almost missed our driveway, but walked into some brush (I’d veered off the road a bit) which helped me get my bearings, and when I started heading down toward our house the trees provided enough of a windbreak that I could tell where the road was and where they were, and I got a little bit of a respite from the wind. Boy, was I glad to get in the house, shed my snowy clothes, and go sit on the heater. As I write this, the snow that has been falling outside for the last several days reminds me of the storms of my childhood, before I ever heard the obnoxious term, “snow showers,” with its intimations of the sleet and rain of October. It was colder in November when I was young, and it snowed more. And it didn’t just fall down—it snowed up, and sideways, too. Alaska has been warming up, and the blizzards and cold snaps of my youth could be mistaken by newcomers for romantic nostalgia. Today’s wimpy winters would lead a cheechako to think it was all exaggeration—and perhaps a bit of it is magnified through the lense of Once Upon a Time and Far Away. But even so, those winters were cold, and snowy, and very real. Fortunately, I survived them. | ||
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