Dreaming of A Snow Day

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Our little piece of the Pine Curtain recently experienced a semi-snow day. A mild ice storm earlier this week prompted the administration to close the college campus at 3 p.m., cancel night classes and delay opening the next day until 10 a.m.

I reckon, at least looking at the 10-day forecast, this is as close as I will get to reliving the childhood indulgence of a snow day.

This winter I have jealously observed as cities to the south and west — places where I used to live, such as Lufkin, Nacogdoches and even normally arid Austin — have been whacked with winter storms that closed schools and universities a couple of times. It has been a colder, stormier winter than normal, but the snow and ice has evaded where we live thus far. I have no desire to be stranded in the type of blizzards that paralyze the Midwest and Northeast. But now that I can actually enjoy a snow day, my colleagues at UT-Austin, SFA and elsewhere were able to stay home on days when it was simply cold and rainy here.

My desire for a genuine snow day — when we all get to stay home cozied up in front of the fire watching Netflix — is admittedly irrational. I grew up in New Hampshire, where one lived with snow for six months out of the year. Snow days were rare in tiny Allenstown, since most kids walked to school and the town plowed the main streets — all three of them — pretty quickly. Once we moved to Texas, however, I learned that school children commonly prayed for a snow day. There is just something exuberant about getting to stay home from school and play in the snow — even if it means an extra day tacked on in late May or early June to make it up.

Snow days didn’t mean a thin  g for much of my career. I still had to go to work regardless of the weather and help get out a newspaper. A snowstorm or worse, an ice storm, just made the task that much more difficult — although it did provide useful fodder for the front page. The trick was getting to work without being creamed by the hordes of drivers who do not have the vaguest idea how to drive on icy roads. That is the strongest argument for having snow days on the flimsiest dustings of the frozen stuff here in Texas. It is even less safe to be on the road than usual.

A colleague pointed out that pickup drivers pose the greatest risk. He claims to have been nearly creamed twice this week by pickups fishtailing into his lane as they accelerated from stoplights. Smart truck drivers weigh down the light rear ends of their vehicles with hay bales or bags of Sakrete.

One day last winter I had to drive to Shreveport to record some commentaries for Red River Radio (I now record the pieces in my closet and email them.) I didn’t check the weather, which quickly deteriorated as I neared the state line. By the time I got on the bypass to head to LSU-Shreveport, it was heavy sleet and the overpasses were icing up. I counted 18 vehicles that had skidded off the road and either into the ditch or median in a five-mile stretch, even though the road wasn’t that slippery. Nearly all of them were pickup trucks.

On the morning that classes started at 10 a.m., I left for work about 30 minutes later than usual. I only spotted one pickup that had skidded off the road between Longview and Kilgore. The bridges were a bit slick but the roads were fine. The campus was largely deserted at 8:45, but nearly all my students showed up at for the 10 a.m. class and about two-thirds for the noon course. Our intrepid staff arrived to put out the weekly student newspaper, which we finished even earlier than usual.

A snow day would have been nice, but it would have made getting the paper out that much harder, so I’m not really complaining. Besides, I am too antsy by nature to spend all day watching Netflix and not being productive. I would have ended up working on my courses or doing something else after a few hours of being a chair potato.

But I sure would have enjoyed having that fire crackling in the study hearth while I worked, a blanket of snow covering the trees outside. Then I would be praying for it to return to our usual 60-degree February highs by the next day. A little snow goes a long way with me.

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