#Snowmageddon Comes to Western Washington...and It Feels Like Home
- Katie Schweiss
- Feb 12, 2019
- 5 min read
They're calling it the snowpocalypse here in the Puget Sound area, the winter of our discontent. And I feel like I'm back in Minnesota, during a mild winter. The single-digit wind chill temps would be a warm spell in the Cities!
These Pacific Northwest dwellers have no idea what a REAL winter is like. Well, maybe some of them do, because at least here in Bellingham, quite a few residents are transplants from the Gopher state.
The last 24 hours have dumped eight inches of snow on us. As I write this, my husband's work van is stuck in the snow a block away at the end of our cul de sac. It's blocking the bank of mail boxes, but I doubt our mail carrier's little vehicle is going to make it today. We're at the top of a steep hill not considered an essential thoroughfare, so who knows how long before we'll get plowed. I'm not holding my breath, because I think the city only has two snow plows.
His first comment when he came in the door after walking back through the drifts was, "We don't have any winter boots, do we?" Of course not. With the average winter temps in this area being somewhere in the mid 30s to 40s and snowfall being pretty minimal, we packed up our down jackets, Sorrels, wool socks, and long underwear and dropped them off at the Goodwill before we moved. And to be fair, in the six years we've lived here, winters have been pretty mild. Some years it hasn't snowed at all, others it was such a light dusting that a broom would take care of what the sun didn't melt by noon.
This year is different. After two days of not being able to go to work because of the snow, hubby is getting a bit of cabin fever. But he's a Kentucky boy, so I'll cut him some slack. He didn't grow up in the Minnesota deep freeze. He glares at me from time to time, and I suspect he's remembering that fateful day in 1989 when we moved from Ohio to St. Paul. It was in the mid 60's when we left Ohio, and the temperature was in the 50s when we arrived. So we didn't bother to check the forecast before we went to bed for the night, intending to move in to our new house the next morning. We were staying with friends on Forest Street near Phalen Park, and we left just about everything in the moving van, including all our plants.
It turned out to be a bad decision. We awoke to a thick coating of snow and temperature at least 20 below. John went out to start the truck so we could go meet the realtor and pick up the keys. Turns out that we didn't know diesel fuel turns to jelly in subzero temps. He just glared at me when he came back in the house. (You see,before we moved I had told him that reports of Minnesota snow and cold temperatures were over-exaggerated.) My Grandma Kate lived just a few blocks away over on Wheelock Parkway, so he walked over to pick up her car, which was kept in the garage. It wasn't long before I got a phone call from a rather irate woman wondering "how in the sam hill" I had "sent that poor boy out without a hat, mittens, scart, and other appropriate winter wear." And those lovely plants, including my five-foot ficus? They looked like they had survived just fine when we pulled the door open. And then once indoors, they began to thaw. A lovely green mess. Oh well.
It took a long time for me to live that one down. His only comment when he came back with the car to pick me up was, "I'm never believing anything you say again for the rest of my life." On February 1st we had a crew help us move in, friends of friends. The guys were all wearing snowmobile suits and ski masks, and to this day I have no idea who most of them were. All I recall is one guy handing me an ice cream bucket of oatmeal raisin cookies and commenting, "Welcome to Minnesota."
John didn't live in St. Paul during the epic winter of 1961-62, and it's probably a good thing he didn't know about it. The four storms of the past week and a half don't even compare to the mountains of white stuff that blizzard dropped on the city and other parts of the state.
We got one of those rare things after a particularly severe storm, a day off from school. (The term 'snow days' hadn't even been coined yet, that's how rare it was.) We woke up to our windows and doors being blocked by drifts. My had had to go upstairs to our neighbor's apartment and drop out of her window to get to the shovel buried on our front steps. Took him a few hours to shovel an exit for us. And then he dug tunnels around the yard so my brother Tom and I could play. I was six years old and I thought it was heaven!
We got a lot of heavy snows back in the 60s when I was in grade school, and I don't recall thinking much about it. Wool snow pants under my dress and Tastee Bread bags on my feet in my boots were standard equipment. The coat rooms at Farnsworth were awash in dirty muck, cleaned up each day after school by the janitor, only to be messed up again afterwards. Wet wool mittens on strings dangled from the hooks, as well as the skates we carried to school to get out on the ice rink at recess.
And then there was the great Halloween Blizzard of 1991. We were living on Ivy off Payne Avenue, right behind Johnson High School. And even though our house was elevated above the street, the snow on the sidewalk about covered the retaining wall. Getting the storm door open required a substantial shove.
Our two kids, ages 2 and 4, were not about to give up trick or treating. And so we bundled them up, costumes over their snow suits. I had the foresight to make cold-weather costumes for them. Andy was toasty warm in his bear costume I'd sewn from an old fur coat I found at the Salvation Army. Jess was the cutest little Holstein cow in her white sweat suit with black felt spots all over it.
My poor husband trudged through the snow up and down our block with those two. He carried a shovel in one hand and their treat buckets in the other. They (the kids, not the husband) thought it was great fun, and they got lots of candy because most kids had stayed home. I think people felt sorry for them that their dad was dragging them around through the two feet of snow. Plus they got the candy I bought to pass out. What few children were going door to door on our street weren't about to brave the flight of steps up to our house; mostly they stuck to the ground-level homes on the block.
We didn't get out for days. The city was in a predicament, because they couldn't plow until after midnight (their contract for snow removal didn't begin until November 1st).
I guess today isn't much different. Doubt we will see a snowplow any time soon. So I'm enjoying my hot cocoa, looking out the window at a very familiar scene, feeling a little nostalgic. Wish I had a pair of boots right now.
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