Snow day

Today is an official Snow Day in the D.C. area. Last night, the late news anchors were announcing "Wintery Mix in the offing" as though the volcano was ready to explode. I don't think Krakatao got as much coverage. We saw reporters "in the field" i.e., the outer 'burbs, all bundled up as if they were members of Sir Vivian Fuchs' Trans-Antarctic expedition. Snow artfully swirling about them, they described the treacherous driving conditions and the armies of snow removal crews and power company teams, waiting for Armageddon to drop. The unsaid question was: if the conditions are so bad, how did you get there to report them? In all fairness, things were not all that bad where a non-native couldn't negotiate them. Then. Later in the night, when the field reporters were happily home with a hot chocolate or something stronger, the real stuff hit the fan, or at least the pavement.

I'm proud to say that I am one of those drivers who gives the Washington area its bad reputation when it comes to snow. This is a place that shuts down operations when the white stuff gets up to the bottom of your shoes. Schools close or open late, the Federal, State, and local governments go to "liberal leave policy" (someone inform Rush Linbaugh), or, more ominously go to "Code Blue", which is never explained but sounds like the school board is holed up in an "undisclosed location" in a hollowed out, thermonuclear-proof mountain with the Vice President. Maybe they play canasta.

Snow around here is not like the snow you had when you were a kid. Snow, by definition, is ice crystals, always hexagonal due to the physics of H2O. When it falls, it lays flat, and packs up. This is fairly straightforward stuff for shoveling and for driving. What we get here is ice. It looks like snow in that both are white and cold, but the similarity pretty much stops there. Try walking in this stuff - real snow crunches down with the satisfying sound of someone squeezing a box of cornstarch (try it, it's what the old radio shows used to use for the sound of someone walking in snow). The stuff we have today splashes away from your shoes like slow motion water. It is not composed of flat snow flakes, but rounded ice pellets. It's like walking in soft beach sand and leaves you breathless after fifty feet.

I know people from elsewhere (read North) who scoff at our puerile efforts at driving in this "wintery mix", thinking it is just snow. Once they notice whatever it is freezing on their windshields as the back end starts to drift, they become fervent converts to D.C. driving. Unless they are field reporters.