Editor’s note: This commentary is by Walt Amses, a former educator and writer who lives in North Calais.
I generally try to put a positive spin on everything I can, believing — in the long run — my selflessness will benefit me, which may compromise my altruism, but is certainly more motivating than being upbeat for no apparent reason. Everyone secretly envies the perennially starry-eyed, but personally, I’d rather feel invulnerably cool, which of course, I’m not.
Even with profound focus on the glass being half-full, the best thing I can say about north central Vermont’s winter thus far is that I’m really glad I haven’t licked any signposts, hardly the road to nirvana for someone pathologically obsessed with snow. A series of bitter, arctic fronts punctuated by brief spikes in temperature has turned potentially substantial snow to mixed precipitation, then heavy rain and almost immediately, layers of ice so thick and ubiquitous that walking has frequently been an expedition-level, bone-jarring adventure.
My love for snow is a longstanding lunacy likely rooted in a Catholic childhood whose only hope of respite — however brief — from marauding, two-fisted nuns was extraordinary winter weather whose cruelty exceeded their own. A decidedly rare event that did — once in great while — smile upon the most targeted boys in the bruised and cowering flock, providing temporary asylum from the asylum that was parochial school in the late 1950s.
I remember when I was a kid, squinting through venetian blinds at a distant streetlamp in an often futile effort to determine whether or not it was snowing, how hard it was coming down, and — most importantly in the city — if it was “sticking.”
In the days before Sputnik, weather was almost as mysterious to meteorologists as it was to everyone else and surprise snowstorms were — in one sense — not all that surprising, but even more delicious, coming completely out of the blue, mandating a day spent eating grilled cheese sandwiches and watching quiz shows, steam radiators hissing in the background. When things tapered off, neighborhood sidewalks could be shoveled, an extra couple of bucks for the more entrepreneurial among us.
Since mid-December, we’ve seen a bitterly cold, volatile pattern that — because of the storm track — has dumped very little snow and a overdose of icy misery on most areas. According to Roger Hill, who has operated Weathering Heights in Worcester since the mid-90s and other Marshfield-based endeavors since the ’80s, a vast, unusually resilient zone of high pressure off the West Coast has contributed not only to our lack of snow, but the drought and wildfires plaguing Southern California.
A recent discussion with Hill — whose service has provided consultation for both the Vermont Symphony Orchestra and the Grateful Dead — illustrated the complexity of factors contributing to our current predicament as well as the difficulty facing forecasters trying to glean pertinent data from the vast array of constantly fluctuating computer models.
His expectation is the pattern — including the so-called “polar vortex” partially responsible for the cold and lack of snowstorms — will be undergoing some changes in the next few weeks. “As the blocking ridge in the Pacific begins to dissipate,” he explained, “we should see an increase in both temperatures and snow level.” Hopefully, this will mean that the storms frequently channeled off the mid-Atlantic coast or — worse yet — to the west, creating Great Lakes snowstorms and heavy rain for us, might well take a more coastal route, expanding the zone of heaviest snow to include Vermont.
For me, this additional information, injecting a ray of hope into the equation of winter, reinforces a half century of straining my eyes, looking far down the road for the next snowstorm. I myopically scan the long-range forecasts, ignoring the fact that — intellectually at least — I understand that, however much forecasting has improved with time and technology, the further out the prognostication, the less validity it has.
Indeed, almost before I can conjure the ghost of the Valentine Day Blizzard, Hill quickly demonstrates the wavering confidence-level of the weather game, offering the caveat that additional frustration may precede any deluge of white: “The latest indications also show a return of big oscillations and mixed precipitation events featuring rain from time to time.” Considering we’re still in the middle of winter, I shudder at the thought of more rain flash freezing into the boilerplate that Vermonters unilaterally despise.
I remember when I was a kid, squinting through venetian blinds at a distant streetlamp in an often futile effort to determine whether or not it was snowing, how hard it was coming down, and — most importantly in the city — if it was “sticking.” I would then compile the available data, make an assessment, and — blissfully undeterred by the futility of predictions — fall asleep with hope in my heart. Aside from there being no streetlamps where I live now, not much has really changed.
