More snow!

Weather forecasts are notoriously unreliable here – maybe everywhere? – but that doesn’t deter the average Canadian from checking them often, seemingly placing enough faith in them to not give up hope that, some day, they might actually be right.

They can be, of course, and when it comes to extreme weather they seem to be more often than not. The winter storm watch posted on Tuesday and upheld on Wednesday, so unlikely on days where the snow vanished almost before my eyes, stubbornly refused to disappear from the weather map. On Wednesday afternoon I hung a load of laundry outside, the snow under my feet whispering with that grainy sound it only makes in the last stage of its life, made porous and hollow by the sun.

The moon, that night, so close to being full, was fuzzy, and the stars not as bright as they should have been – the first indication that things were about to change. “Five to ten centimetres over night”, said the weatherman on the radio, “and another ten centimetres possible before the system moves out Thursday afternoon.” Well, it might not happen – right? Or it might happen somewhere else, possibly: there were, after all, areas further east that hadn’t received any of Sunday’s snowfall, where farmers would rejoice if their cracked soil was covered with a nice white blanket.

It was not to be. When I woke up yesterday morning the trees were obscured by thick snowflakes; I could see that much from my bed already. Even with the prior warning, however, I was unprepared for the view that presented itself when I got up: more than twenty centimetres of snow had fallen already, and there was no sign that it was about to stop anytime soon. The announcement on the radio at 6:30  revealed several bus cancellations in counties bordering ours already, but our buses seemed to be running. This would be interesting!

Maya shouldered her bag at 7:45, pulled on her boots, and followed Leo up the driveway. As usual he was going to make sure that she got off okay. Ten minutes later they returned, Maya’s legs soaked from the onslaught of the wind-driven wet snow. The bus was nowhere to be seen. No wonder: roads still wet and muddy from the snowfall a few days ago were now covered with new snow; it was unlikely that the bus would be able to negotiate this mess. Soon came the bus driver’s call: trying to turn around after her first pickup she had almost got stuck, so she brought the boy back and drove home.

We had been planning to attend a 60^th birthday celebration about an hour's drive east of here but were unwilling to put ourselves in harm’s way: area highways were treacherous and visibility very poor. Even in Edmonton the snow was wreaking havoc, power outages along the city’s major commuter routes putting traffic lights out of order at rush hour time – not a pretty situation. 

We decided to wait until it stopped snowing before we attempted to go anywhere. By eleven-thirty, finally, snowflakes thin and sparse now, thirty-two centimetres of new snow on the ground, we slowly made our way out of the driveway with the four-wheel drive pickup – no use trying to make it with the small car. One set of tracks transected the white band of the road, the snow pushed up in ridges on both sides. They looked like the tracks of a small car, too, the snow showing the telltale scraping of a car’s belly. Our amazement that the car got through snow this deep did not last long, however. Coming over the hill we could see a dark mass in the distance: the car, stopped in the middle of the road with a raised hood. The driver, a bit abashed, told us the car had overheated in his attempt to make it through. He declined our offer to assist him in some way, and we ploughed through the now pristine snow for almost two miles more until we reached the highway.

We had no trouble, though it certainly was not very nice driving for the first forty miles or so. I felt sorry, too, for the birds who had so optimistically returned to their summer homes: small groups of geese flying overhead had trouble staying the course in the strong winds, and hawks were sitting, wet and bedraggled, on fence posts while their meal, the mice, were undoubtedly unwilling to tunnel out into the open through a foot of snow.

About half way to our destination the roads were bare, and fields nearly so: again it was our immediate area that had borne the brunt of the wintry assault. Our hopes of getting into the fields early will not be fulfilled, that much is clear already. Again, too, we will have to manoeuvre around water holes, which is always a nuisance. On the other hand, this unrequested late snow might mean the difference between good and poor crop emergence, so we will not complain too loudly.

During the afternoon the sky had cleared, and the setting sun was in my eyes on the way home. A golden glow lay on the snow and on melt water lakes that had formed in many depressions already, the wind had calmed down, and once again geese were walking in pairs along the water’s edge, or even went for an evening swim.

It might not have been the last snow of the season, but it is not so bad anymore: these are spring storms now, and even today the foot of snow has been reduced by about half already. For me, it means I can watch juncos cluster at the feeder at breakfast time, enjoying these pretty transitory visitors with their neat dark and light grey plumage and their bright little beaks. They are joined by the flock of redpolls that has frequented the feeder for the second half of the winter, but the chickadees must be busy with other matters: I can hear them trill their spring song in the bush.