Well, it's official. We have now accumulated enough snow (14.5", 36+ cm) to make this the:
- Snowiest December (possibly for the whole Pacific Northwest)
- 4th Snowiest Winter Season (and we've only just begun)
- Snowiest Christmas Day* (for Portland)
It's been a learning experience for me. Yes, bad weather happens. But rather than rounding up all the individuals with snowplows in Western Oregon (many of which must exist, living on ranches in the hills) and paying them to clear the roads, many of the smaller towns around Portland are just waiting for the warmer temperatures to come and melt the snow away. These towns are at a virtual standstill, due to unplowed roads. Even Portland itself hasn't yet cleared any residential streets that I've seen, by this, the 9th day of accumulation. The passivity is at the individual level, too -- most residences haven't shoveled (I suppose a lot of people don't have shovels). The sidewalks are hard to walk, the roads dangerous. Busses with chains are skidding off the streets; the streetcar system is running late, when running at all.
When I was six years old, the winter of 1968-1969, we had snow drifts above the rain gutters of our single-story house in western Minnesota, enough that we could slide off the roof and down to the frozen lake at the bottom of our half-acre lawn. HomoDommi remembers we had only two days of school that January. I remember falling through a snowbank into a large ice-sparkling cavern formed by the dryer vent, twice as tall as I was. But I don't remember the houseboundedness. What must it have felt for my workaholic father, unable to get to campus? My mother, at home with three kids -- and that hyperactive husband -- for six weeks and no respite of school, or even much outdoor play, in sub-zero Minnesota temperatures? You couldn't even see out the floor-to-ceiling windows, covered over by wet, dark gray snowdrifts. Talk about claustrophobia!
Here, we can actually go places (walking or in the one all-wheel-drive car, outfitted with chains), but there is nowhere to go. The City Administration is ostensibly open, but the libraries are shut down, the community centers, the gyms, all "non-essential" services, closed. People can't get to work to open shops; when they do, few customers can get in to buy anything. Delivery trucks can't get through to the city, so the larger grocery stores have empty shelves. We've had one power outage of 2 hours here in NE Portland; poor Vernonia, a town northwest of the city almost destroyed by flooding a year ago, lost power for a couple of days.
For a couple of days, sliding held thrall. But Boy-child took a direct hit against a tree, which bruised his knee and pulled sore muscles (he limps sorely when he remembers, but aside from the Drama, it was a nasty tumble). The same accident shattered his sled; the other, inflatable, has popped. The stores we can reach are long since sold out of sleds, needless to say. Today the snow is evolving into rain as we finally start to warm up, and the snow is finally perfect for snowmen; there has been enough accumulation that forts could be built and major battles engaged, if the rain holds off long enough.
