snow, Snow, SNOW!

It snowed, I mean, really snowed, two days ago. As much as 3-5 inches in our yard, with sheets of blowing snow, and minuscule drifts. And it has stayed cold since, so we still have snow. (That is, "cold", relatively speaking, with a nod toward Minnesota, where it is -1 F in St. Paul as I write.) Everything shut down on Sunday, with cars routinely sliding into poles. Retailers touting "10 shopping days until Christmas" in a frigid and sinking economy closed mid-afternoon. Schools had a Snow-Day on Monday; those west of the Willamette River (where there are more steep hills than here on the east) are closed again today. Another storm is due tomorrow, and the schools are expected to close again then. The weather folks are predicting this to be the longest-lasting stretch of below-freezing weather in decades.

Even so, we are likely not to have a white Christmas.

We get frustratingly little winter weather activity here in Portland. Sometimes (well, most of the time) that's a good thing -- I am thrilled not to have to shovel snow, slip on ice, and scrape the windshield daily from November to April, as those who live in the Northern Latitudes usually have to.

When I was a teenager, living in the rural mountains of Eastern Oregon, Portland would get 9-10 inches of snow a year. How we would sneer and joke when each 2-inch snowstorm would shut down the city entirely. Our mountain-embraced valley closed regularly from storms on the passes, locking us in with ourselves for weeks at a time. Two inches of snow was barely enough for our winter pastimes: snow-shoeing to school, spinning wheelies in the parking lots (for those wealthy enough to have a car, or those who worked on a ranch and so needed a pick-up simply to get in from the valley to school), and filling the Persecuted-Classmate-du-Jour's locker with hard-packed snow-balls from the bed of that pick-up. I have no idea what the grown-ups did in the weather -- certainly the school system, retail stores and the college up the hill didn't close.

(Hey, I was just a teenager at a rough rural high school, and frankly, I was not engaging in these activities, being myself just one step above PCdJ myself. In true nerd fashion, I was often at the end of the hall watching the intimidation from a distance, waving my fingers across my body as I recited, This is not the droid you seek -- I mean, geek that I was, I actually did that, didn't just joke about it.)

These days, thirty years later, Portland gets about 2-3 inches of snow a year, usually in dustings between ice storms. This is the first real snowstorm I've seen in the three years I've lived here. Thank you, global warming climate change.

Marquam Bridge, which is also I-5.

The real issue is ice. The temperatures are, well, temperate, rarely below freezing for much of the city (which is built on hills, so some of the more expensive real estate overlooking the rest of the city gets a few degrees cooler weather than the rest of us. But I'm talking about the rest of us). Usually, the copious precipitation remains near-liquid, and any snow melts into sleet as it falls. Portland has many lovely bridges, arcing high over the rivers; driving over them at 60 mph even in high, dry, summer, I have fretted about the long drop down to the water. I don't drive over them at all when it's slippery (although, to be fair, I haven't read of any tragedies in our current weather).

Fremont Bridge

So, as with so many life lessons, I have come full circle and understand from within, now, how a few inches of snow really can shut down a city unprepared for it. What a grace maturity is, giving us a comb after we've lost all our hair.

(Bridge photos by Mark C. Scherzinger, from http://en.structurae.de. Click on them to see them larger.)