I don’t know anyone who knows the names of 18 kinds of snow, which, as legend has it, any Inuit can easily reel off at an early age. But by last April, everyone I know had at least 18 words to describe snow – all of them unflattering. There was an awful lot of snow. Heavy, wet snow.
As I write this, we’ve just gotten started on February, and this year’s snowpack has almost topped the garden fence. The fence is about four feet high, and wasn’t buried until late in February last year.
Even though most of us have done plenty of shoveling this winter, the present snow deserves nothing less than 18 complimentary adjectives. Although it is indeed deep, at least the top foot is wonderfully fluffy. Before the most recent snow settled a bit, it was so fluffy that even a hopping red squirrel couldn’t quite get airborne; he was leaving tracks that look like one of those decorative stitches on my sewing machine that I never use. And the fisher’s usually widely-spaced bounds were like the tracks of everybody else: a furrow with punctuation marks. Deer tracks are nowhere to be seen. They disappeared suddenly, as soon as the snow reached about 20 inches. Ironically, it’s the short-legged creatures who now prevail. Little mice and voles are my favorites as they incise zippers along the snow’s surface.
Now there is a seemingly endless soft blanket over the earth – all the rough places are smooth. In the morning and evening light an undulating sculpture, covered with satin, lies over the land. It couldn’t be more beautiful.
The long spell of truly cold weather that settled over us has helped to keep the snow in such pristine condition. A couple of weeks ago, my stash of firewood, which had appeared to be relatively stable, began doing a disappearing act. Neighbors are reminded of the old days, when we had real winters. We proudly exchange our overnight lows; as you know, the coldest hollows create superior human beings.
Today I was reminded that, despite all the white iciness that surrounds us, it is downright cozy at ground level. The road crew, while pushing back snowbanks, got to the bottom of things and revealed unfrozen, earthy smelling dirt at the edge of the road. This confirms what loggers have been saying: the ground is barely frozen, if at all.
Ten inches of fresh snow is approximately equal to a six-inch-layer of fiberglass insulation, with an R-value of R-18. Now granted, not all 48 inches of our snowy blanket is made of new snow, and old snow is not half as good an insulator, but in the depth of winter the earth continues to radiate heat, heat that moves but slowly through four feet of any kind of snow.
One cold morning last week, when it was -12 degrees F outside the window, I plunged a cheap, bulky thermometer into the snow and it warmed my heart to see the temperature rise each time I lowered it a few more inches. At ground level it read +27 degrees. Still below freezing, but not by much.
As the fee-beeing chickadees have noticed, we are halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, and before long the earth will once again begin packing in the warmth to be distributed next winter.
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