Confessions of a Snowbelt Warrior

The view from our porch on Tuesday at 6:51 a.m. in Cleveland, Ohio.

We had our first big snowstorm earlier this week and it was a real hit in this house, judging by all the barking. I love watching our two dogs storm out the door in the early morning without realizing how life has changed. They slide through the snow and come to a screeching halt at the edge of the deck. Then they yell at each other like a startled married couple until one of them can’t take it anymore and leaps.

We live in Cleveland, just close enough to Lake Erie to be on the receiving end of lake effect snow--sometimes, but not always. It varies from town to town, mile by mile. I like to look up snowfall totals in Northeast Ohio after a big storm because Ashtabula County, in the snowbelt where I grew up, almost always outperforms everyone else. This time, for example, our yard saw about six inches. Part of Ashtabula County got thirteen. My people.

I like to think that having survived a childhood in the snowbelt telegraphs a certain sturdiness about me. I am particularly welded to this magical thinking when I’m preparing to drive in a snowstorm, which was my plan at 6:51 a.m. on Tuesday after I captured that view from our front porch. Observant eyes may spot the outline of round two of my fake seasonal flower arrangements, in the box on the railing. (We’ve talked about this.) I’m going to have to call a halt to this new habit of buying things I’ve sworn I’d never own. Next thing you know I’ll be wearing false eyelashes and everyone will be trying to pretend I don’t look like Mr. Snuffleupagus.

Snow was falling, wind was howling, and I had a class to teach on a campus 106 miles south of our buried driveway. “It’s barely snowing,” I told my husband, who was in Washington. This little lie might have worked in the past, but now he starts his day by listening to our local public radio station on his phone. Why did I show him how to do that?

Sherrod had already heard about the 217 car crashes—perhaps it was only seven—on the very highway I’d be using, so we reached a compromise. I’d delay departure until the city snowplows came through and call him as soon as I reached that magical spot when the snow suddenly stops, and the sun comes out.

This really happens.

Here’s the photo from my iPhone camera, mounted on the dashboard, at 10:36 a.m.

Photo captured on my iPhone camera mounted on my dashboard while driving 32 miles per hour in a 70 mph zone.

Here’s a photo from that same camera nine minutes later, at 10:45 a.m.

This photo is blurry because I was finally driving the speed limit and could not focus my camera because that would be unsafe. Nevertheless, you are free to lecture me. I grew up in the snowbelt. I can take it.

Our father always complained about winter, mostly because it never seemed to end. He raised us to keep our gas tanks full and our trunks always stocked with snow gear, which can look pretty silly in July but you never know around here. We have so many family photos of us kids thigh-high in snow because Dad hated winter and never tired of documenting all the reasons why.

Dad taught all four of us kids how to shovel snow at a very young age. Mom was only four-feet-eleven, and she was no match for the mountains of overnight snowfall.

“Toss and pack, toss and pack,” he’d yell as we dug out a tunnel to Mom’s car. “We don’t want to lose your mother!” No wall of snow could be higher than Mom’s beehive, so that we could track her progress.

My brother Chuckie, The Prince, was the youngest. He loved the snow when he was little. After every big snowstorm, sometimes during it, Mom would bundle him up until he could barely move and push him out the side door like a parachuter. An hour or so later she would order me to “pull on a jacket”—no gloves, no hat, no scarf--and “go check on your brother.”

Inevitably, I would find Chuckie with his best friend Jeff Hutchinson, both of them covered in snow and stiff as cow cadavers, unable to blink. I’d drag him down the street as he screamed, “I’m not cold! I’m not cold!” Then he’d sob through the twenty-two minutes it took Mom to chisel him out of the frozen cocoon.  

My 2-year-old sister, Leslie, and 4-year-old me in the final winter before our brother, Chuckie, was born. Photo: Charles C. Schultz

Four-year-old Chuckie, in one of hundreds of family photos in which he appears to be an only child. Photo: Charles C. Schultz

I probably shouldn’t share this next story because I don’t look particularly good in it, but Mom would want me to mention it as an example of how hard it was to be our mother. When Chuckie was six, he and Jeff were building a snow fort when an avalanche of snow fell from the Hutchinsons’ front roof and landed on their heads.

“Buried them alive,” Mom would want me to say.

Fortunately, three men at the gas station across the street witnessed this catastrophe (Mom’s word) and ran to dig out the boys.  

“They saved your brother’s life,” my mother said, for the next 31 years.

This is my first memory of having failed to read the room. I was eleven years old. That evening at dinner, my mother went on and on about how lucky we were that Chuckie was with us at the table. Chuckie this, Chuckie that. Chuckie, Chuckie, Chuckie.

All I did was casually observe that, had he not made it, my parents would still have had three daughters. You would have thought I had confessed to a plot to commit murder. Longest winter of my life. “Your father and I are going to try to forget that you ever did that,” she once said to me. I was 37 at the time.

Anyway, on Tuesday of this week I drove through that snowstorm and made it to Denison University with an hour to spare before class. I kept pulling out my phone to show people those before-and-after photos of my treacherous journey, but no one seemed terribly impressed.

I get it. That’s how it goes when you’re from the snowbelt.

I know envy when I see it.