NO MORE SNOW DAYS?
Changing climate may mean rite of passage lost to time
Last week, as my 5-year-old peered out our front windows and pined for snow, I realized her 2-year-old brother had never seen the ground blanketed in white. That’s not so unusual for children in many parts of the world, of course. But I grew up in New England, where winter could be counted on to deliver wonderlands.
For the first few years of my daughter’s life in Washington, D.C., she donned her snowsuit at least once a season. The idea that my little boy had gone so long without encountering snow felt like a generational dividing line: between snow as a guarantee and snow as a rarity, between a childhood lightly marked by climate change and one defined by it.
The climate’s increasing warmth and unpredictability make themselves felt in many ways.
Gardeners see the impact in the Department of Agriculture’s shifting Plant Hardiness Zone Map, which shows average low winter temperatures and provides guidance about which plants will thrive in which regions.
For coastal homeowners, the new reality arrived in 2021 via soaring insurance premiums intended to provide a more realistic accounting of more frequent and severe storms.
Californians are finding their air-conditioner-free architecture rendered obsolete by summer heat waves.
Like these other changes, the loss of snowpack poses a real threat to the billions of people who live in communities where snow is an important part of the regional water cycle. As my colleagues in the newsroom recently reported, a study in the journal Nature suggests that once regions start experiencing winter temperatures that don’t fall below an average of 17.6 degrees Fahrenheit, snow accumulation declines precipitously.
Areas that rely on that snow to replenish rivers and reservoirs could find themselves in real trouble.
In climates where the winters are milder, snow might not stick, if it falls at all. New York City’s 701-day snow drought ended Tuesday; D.C. had gone even longer, a whole 729 days without snow.
The disappearance of snow is bittersweet as well as consequential. It’s a loss for which the surprise delights of a January-blooming cherry tree or a dahlia tuber that survives a mild winter can’t begin to compensate. Nowhere is that clearer than in the way children react to snow — and in the children’s literature that chronicles their age-old response to it.
In The Giver, Lois Lowry’s dystopian young adult novel about a child named Jonas who is chosen to carry the memories of a world before society eliminated all difference and variability, the first glimpse of the past he’s given is a sled ride on a snowy day. The experience isn’t merely weather.
For Jonas, it’s his first experience of “the breathless glee that overwhelmed him: the speed, the clear cold air, the total silence, the feeling of balance and excitement and peace.”
Snow also offers a disruption of routine and a suspension of the rules — one that is more welcome to children sprung from school than parents struggling to clear sidewalks and line up alternative care. Snow itself is an opportunity for children to shape the world, rather than bending to the world’s requirements.
That might mean leaving playful footprints and gentle snow angels, as Peter, Ezra Jack Keats’ protagonist, does in the groundbreaking 1962 picture book The Snowy Day.
Or snow could be a hilariously morbid canvas for the fantasies of a kid like Calvin,
the 6-year-old scamp with a proclivity for snow monsters that Bill Watterson introduced to newspaper comic pages in 1985. “The world looks brand-new! It’s like having a big white sheet of paper to draw on,” Calvin’s tiger, Hobbes, told him in the final strip of the acclaimed series.
“A day full of possibilities,” Calvin agreed. “It’s a magical world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy. Let’s go exploring!”
It was with Calvin’s directive in mind that when last week’s forecast began to promise our first real snow in two years, I splurged on snow pants and heavy socks that we might not have cause to use again before my children grow out of them.
On Monday evening, we watched the snow thicken in the glow of the streetlights. My daughter made snow angels in our backyard. We all built a snowman, whose body was repurposed for a snow fight with the neighbors. I towed my son around the yard on our little plastic sled. And both kids did their best to help their father shovel the front walk.
This storm didn’t match the biggest snows of my youth, when my family slept in front of our fireplace and slid through quiet streets on cross-country skis. But if it turns out to be the last snow of my son’s childhood, there’s a chance he might remember it.
“Why don’t we have snow, and sleds, and hills?” Jonas asks in The Giver. His mentor responds that society eliminated these things in a quest to free itself from inconvenience and unpredictability.
As terrible as that decision seems, at least it was a choice.
I hope I don’t have to tell my children and grandchildren that we simply gave up on snow as we let temperatures rise, rendering sleds obsolete without noticing what we’d end up missing.