More snow, but still walkable.
Winter is begun here, now, I suppose. It blew part of the hair off the dog yesterday and got the rest this morning.
-Mark Twain
Another 2 or 3 inches of snow fell over the past 24 hours. That’s just enough to bury the distance markers on the rail trail, but not enough to make the walking much harder. The temp is in the high 20s, with wind chill, and the sky is overcast. The storm laid down a layer of white on the tops of tree branches, squirrel dreys (nests) and the tarmac. The effect is to make the world look like a white piece of paper on which Mother Nature judiciously drew a few well-placed squiggly lines of sepia ink to give the impression of a wintry landscape. She did a beautiful job.
By kicking at the snow in strategic places, I can find the 0.5, 1.5, 2.0 and 2.5, but not the 3.0, nor the 1.0 distance markers. The 3.0 marker remains elusive and, I suspect, under the hardpack where it’s difficult to dislodge the snow with my boot. The only hint I have to the location of the 1.0 marker is a large rock at the edge of the new park. Unfortunately, the rock is buried under so much snow, I can’t see where it’s hiding. There’s not even a telltale bulge in the white to give away its presence. Tomorrow, there’s a nor’easter scheduled to dump about 20 more inches of snow in a blizzard, so finding all the markers just might have to wait for the spring thaw.
Last year was a light-snow year and I didn’t have to do much trailblazing at all to get Waldo and I through the drifts. This year is a bit more average, maybe a little above, but not the worst New England has seen. That honor goes to “The Great Snow” of 1717. Over the course of 9 days, 5 storms inundated the area with up to 5 feet of the cold icy stuff, with drifts up to 16 feet deep. People in New Hampshire could only leave their homes by crawling out of their second-floor windows and there were places where people tunneled through the snow to get between buildings. Some, in Boston, walked around on stilts (I’m not sure how that worked – how could they lift the stilt out of the snow to take a step?).
The Great Snow may have been the worst (in recorded history), but it wasn’t entirely unique. In 1888, 50 inches fell and there have been heavy snow falls in my life time. There was “The Blizzard of 1978,” when up to 19 inches fell on top of 21 inches already on the ground. In 1993, we had the “Storm of the Century,” that closed all the major airports on the Atlantic seaboard. During my time in Massachusetts, we had “The April Fool’s Day Storm” that dumped 3 feet of snow, where I lived in Sterling, on April 1st, 1997. There was the 2003 “President’s Day Storm” that left up to 30 inches of new snow and holds the all-time record for snowfall in Boston, of 27.5 inches, in a 24-hour period. I remember well having to stay in the hospital where I worked, in 2013, because of “Winter Storm Nemo” that was so severe that the governor of Massachusetts issued a state-wide travel ban. In 2015, “Winter Storm Juno” produced hurricane winds and buried nearby Worcester in 34.5 inches and Hudson in 36 inches of snow.
I can’t mention these storms without thinking about the “Year Without a Summer,” in 1816. From 1808 to 1814, five volcanic eruptions put some amount of ash and dust into the atmosphere. Then, in 1815, Mount Tamburo, in Indonesia, had a mega-eruption that put so much additional stuff in the air that the sun was significantly blocked out all around the northern hemisphere, causing crop failures and famine, and cooling the Earth, making it colder than normal all summer. It even snowed up to 9 inches in Maine on June 1st! There were supposed to have been some gorgeous sunsets, though. (As an aside, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron and Mary Shelley were in Switzerland at the time. It rained so much they had to stay inside for days. Byron challenged the 3 of them to a contest to see who could write the scariest story. Mary Shelley won with “Frankenstein.”)
So, I guess, New Englanders have weathered through worse winter storms than what is predicted for the next few days. For Waldo and I, the ugliest part will be that we won’t walk on the rail trail until it’s plowed.
But we shall return!
And more snow yet to come.