Getting Snowed

For much of December, severe weather seemed to hammer every region of our country. Crop-killing frosts swept Florida. Record-breaking rain and mudslides again plagued California. Winter tornadoes blasted parts of Arkansas. Elsewhere, snow was the main culprit. It paralyzed the Atlanta airport, ground New York City to a near standstill, shocked the ill-prepared inhabitants of the desert Southwest (though no preparation seemed to fail more miserably than that at London’s Heathrow airport where mid-December snow removal efforts seemed tantamount to clearing a snowbound driveway with a wooden spoon). More familiarly, a nor’easter pummeled the New England coast and snow arrived on the island just as Christmas departed.

For some of us islanders, the magic that more than a foot of new snow gave the winter landscape seemed almost a type of late Christmas present – like an ermine cape draped over what had been a dull homespun brown. I was also reminded of Johannes Kepler’s observation in his treatise On the Six-Cornered Snowflake that a snowflake is “a perfect Christmas gift….it comes down from heaven and looks like a star.”

A 17th century astronomer, Kepler was among the first to make scientific reference to snow crystals which, as we learned in high school science, are a form of frozen precipitation. Snowflakes, on the other hand, are only created when an assemblage of snow crystals, be they shaped like plates, needles or columns, fasten together, sustain a fall to earth, and, in the case of a true nor’easter, withstand sustained 40 mph-plus winds. That they can, claimed Kepler but without the means of proof in 1611, is due in part to their closely packed, acquired-while-plummeting-through-the-atmosphere hexagonal symmetry – you know, the familiar six-sided, flat star-like construction that in our earliest chubby-fingered artistic endeavors we cut from folded paper and our parents taped to window or refrigerator. Iconic shapes that are reproduced in just about every snow-depicting Christmas card and animated holiday film, the true beauty of which was first and most accurately and artistically captured by Wilson “The Snow Flake Man” Bentley, a self-educated Vermont farmer who in 1885 rigged together a camera bellows and microscope and produced in his life-time 5,000 detailed photomicrographed images of “ice flower” snowflakes, no two of which were exactly alike.

All this, admittedly, was not foremost on my mind as I cozied up to a fire with a good book and through the window watched a holiday week’s snow hurl past. The quiet afternoon did summon Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” lines I’d memorized long ago – “whose woods these are I think I know….” And later, as the afternoon wore down and the woods surrounding the house did indeed become “lovely, dark and deep,” my thoughts were prodded toward the more prosaic: How long would it take to dig out the driveway come morning? How much snow was drifting up against the woodpile?

But with the fire stoked, the larder full and the wind not yet at its full blown howl, such was the serendipity of a snowbound day that the book I was reading was Maine writer Bill Roorbach’s Temple Stream and the chapter I opened to depicted his dog-walking chance encounter, while away teaching a semester at Ohio State, with a former well-known Maine TV weatherman and now an Ohioan transplant. What interested me most in their subsequent conversations about, natch, the weather and their mutual missing of rugged Maine winters (seriously), were the myriad scientific names for snow proffered by an enthusiastic weather guy. Like graupel, officially rice-sizedice crystals coated with rime, but which most of us would liken to snow pellets. Firn mirror may be the meteorological term for the thin sheet of ice that forms over old snow, but for many of us it simply spells to old bones: Beware. Frazil, needle-shaped ice crystals formed in turbulent water, are better known to islanders as the slush preceding sea ice (and much colder nights to come). And those irregular grooves or ridges formed on the snow’s surface by wind or erosion but often look as though intentionally scripted or sculpted with an artist’s eye are sastrugi.  

All words surely hefty with the technical and scientific, but what, I wondered, was the word for snow that looked blue in the morning? Individual words that compactly summon a phrase or line? That paint an image? Was any single word capable of defining snow on a cloudless night after a fresh tree-cloaking snowfall, when, as William Carlos Willliams writes, “a liquid moon/moves gently among/the long branches?” Even if, as fellow poet Wallace Steven instructs: “One must have a mind of winter/To regard the frost and the boughs/Of the pine-trees crusted with snow….”, is it possible that a single word can define that kind of snow?

Years ago, I’d read that the Eskimo – actually, the Inuit – have 26 words for snow common to their everyday language. In that context, English seemed impoverished. Later I read that this number had morphed into as many as 400 words. More recently, I’ve learned that all of this has been debunked as nothing more than a type of urban legend. All those supposed individual Inuit words for snow are in fact made by compound words and phrases, by adding suffixes to root words, as could be achieved in English and numerous other languages.

In some “wordie” circles, this had led to some fun. Appearing in online Word a few years ago was Phil James’ “The Eskimos’ 100 Words for Snow.” His listing of words based on tla (snow) is a lengthy one, with words that define, for example, snow marked by wolves or snow mixed with mud. Given the assumption that snow has a greater cultural significance to the Inuits, such particular differentiation is believable. But when you get to James’ listing of words that define, for example, snow marked by Eskimos or snow mixed with Husky shit (a subcategory word of which is snow mixed with the shit of a lead dog), you begin to get the author’s satirical drift. And consider this: tlavin, snow that can be sculpted into delicate corsages to be worn on whale skin parkas. Even for the slowest to catch on, by the time you get to – hahatla, small packs of snow given as gag gifts or Mactla, snow made into burgers, or mextla, snow used to make margaritas – the jinx is up.

Still, it’s nice to think that there might be words that come from careful looking – “Looking is when one sees,” as Roorbach observes. Like, say, some not-so-scientific but rather type of winged word for snow that falls quickly. Or for Frost’s “dust of snow” a crow shakes down from a hemlock tree, just enough to “give a heart a change of mood.” There’s something about Bentley’s “ice flowers” that is preferable, no?, to an assemblage of “spatial dendrites”?

But while pleasant to muse over when sitting comfortably beside a fire and the inches outside accrue, what comes to mind and mouth if, instead, you’re slogging your way to work on the only and as-yet-unplowed road or waiting out another cancelled flight at an airport gummed up by a snowstorm unwilling to call it quits, are words likely ripe with expletive and scarce on the lyrical, and require no translation.