I’ve spent most of my spare time recently writing my Michigan Road report. I hope to finish it this weekend and then get back to blogging! Meanwhile, I’ve dusted off and edited one of my earliest posts in honor of this lingering winter.
As much as I don’t enjoy winter, I have to admit that Indianapolis winters usually aren’t that bad. We do get one, maybe two, heavy snows each year. The city can never plow the streets fast enough; more than once, my commute home has turned into a four-hour endurance test. And every winter seems to have a few days cold enough that I need my wool-lined Army-surplus trench coat that has repelled every wind for the 20 years I’ve owned it. I needed that old coat as I cleared a foot of snow off my driveay after this recent storm. Otherwise, during Indy winters the ground is clear and I wear a medium jacket.
During my South Bend kidhood, snow was on the ground from November to April. Oh, the snow forts I built and snowball fights I, well, lost because I can’t throw straight to save my life. But whatever love of snow I might have had died when I was about nine – my dad issued me a shovel and told me to hit the driveway. There were times we shoveled two or three times a day for five days at a stretch. I routinely shoveled in the blowing cold. And how the cold wind could blow in South Bend! I remember walking to and from school in winds so strong and cold that I would sometimes walk for blocks sideways, legs braced, so my back could take the brunt.
Terre Haute’s temperate winters made it seem like a distant foreign land. Snows always melted within a few days, and I could usually run around with an unzipped coat and no hat. But Terre Haute was prone to ice storms, and several hit while I lived there. They always disrupted life by snapping power lines and turning the roads into skating rinks. But the ice storms could sure leave some beauty behind. Everything would be coated in a layer of ice, making ordinary things such as trees and street signs and fences seem fresh and clean – and stiff. I remember driving down I-70 on my way back to college a couple days after an ice storm. The trees lining the road seemed like ghosts as their white-tipped branches hung low and still.
After an ice storm in about 1990, I chipped a half inch of ice off my car with considerable effort and drove the slippery roads to work with considerable care. I wished I had time to snap photos of some of the storm’s work. When I got to the office, I found the building dark and cold. My co-workers huddled in the breakroom drinking gas-station coffee. The power company didn’t know when power would be restored, and even then it would take hours for our computer servers to boot. I didn’t fancy shivering in the dark breakroom all day, so I drove back home, found my camera, and walked a block to Collett Park to take some photos. My photography skills were, charitably, weak, but some of the photos turned out all right.
I came upon this young oak near the horseshoe club’s pit. The tree must not have been too strong, given that it was propped up like that. But its leaves were awfully tenacious, still clinging to the tree well into winter. Even the ice storm’s strong winds couldn’t break these leaves free. Instead, the ice conformed itself to the leaves.
The mature trees, having long ago lost their leaves, glowed in a quarter-inch coating of ice.
The ice weighed the branches down, making them hang low.
The nets on the tennis court glistened, frozen stiff.
I would have thought an ice-covered slide would be lightning slick, but I thought twice about trying it when I saw ice clumped up down the middle, ready to assault my sensitive parts.
This fence looked like a Photoshop “unsharp mask” effect had been applied to it in real life – except that nobody had really heard of Photoshop yet.
The storm also left ice appearing to drip off the clothesline and power lines in my back yard.
