Lessons From an Unexpected Snow Day

When wild westerly winds rush through our majestic forests - whose primary residents are 120-foot-tall trees - chaos ensues here in blustery Western Washington.  Gusts which train through at 60 miles per hour knock these giants about, and their massive limbs come crashing down.  Accompanying rain produces unfortunate mudslides down the hills, but fortunate snow up in the mountains.  Pine needles annoyingly stick to everything and lucky neighbors with generators drown out the silence in the middle of the night.

The very tall trees that bend in the breeze next to my house. One fell in the woods a few years ago it shook the house!

My town is enviously positioned at the foothills of the Cascades. Sunrises here are utterly breathtaking.  The price we pay for being adjacent to such splendor means we live at a weather-significant threshold.  These cyclone storms dump rain to lighten their load in order to climb over the mountains – a rain shadow effect.  They also funnel through the gaps and passes between the mountains.  As wind constricts into these narrow passages, its speed accelerates dramatically.  The result is that, for a handful of days throughout the year, fallen trees snap power lines and bludgeoned transformers blow, causing massive power outages here in Maple Valley and the Puget Sound area. This weekend’s latest windstorm affected over 135,000 of us customers.  Sometimes these outages last for hours.  Other times, days.  For me, they always arouse excitement because of the nostalgia of fond memories back home.

Outages from the windstorm in Western Washington 10.25-10.26.25

Having grown up enthusiastically watching “Little House on the Prairie” in Northwestern Pennsylvania, I was thrilled when the power went out.  Life became simple and rustic just like in the 19th Century days of Laura and Mary.  Dad would light a fire in the fireplace in our kitchen. Mom would light the gas stove to heat water in the tea kettle.  And I dove into the hall closet to bring out all the blankets I could carry.  As I’m writing this, I can feel the warmth of the flames as I camped out under the mantle. Those chilly, cozy days were celebrated with celestial confetti - thick snowflakes fell with whimsical promise from the sky.  Snowflakes like this in Erie heralded a much-anticipated string of snow days.

Example of the Lake Effect Snow in Erie, Pennsylvania (2024)

Snow days in Erie were commonplace, so we were wisely prepared.  Erie pantries in the 1970’s and 80’s were fully packed in advance of the season.  For some reason, instead of caches of toilet paper and water, families stocked up on Stroehmann bread and gallons of milk.  My mother saved plastic bread bags in an antique green ceramic jug on the kitchen counter.   They were needed for encasing little feet to slip them into snug, little red rubber boots.  Our large coat closet housed an overflowing box of multiple scarves, practical hats, and a bevy of mittens and gloves.  All rotated between the closet box, then onto little hands and faces, and eventually given a well-deserved repose next to the fire to dry.  Erie kids of the 70’s and 80’s often wore one-piece snowmobile suits that swished as we walked.  We looked like little marshmallows bounding up and down our snow drifted driveways.

In 1978, a wonderfully blustery blizzard brought such heavy snowfall that it cancelled school for days.  Our front yards were transformed into our school, and my friends and I gladly attended all the classes.  Snowball fights with the neighbor boys taught us warfare strategy.  Designing snow forts and igloos were practical lessons in engineering. Seeing who was dumb enough to stick their tongue on metal – that was psychology.  And of course, for phys ed, we happily dragged out our sleds.

Fortuitously, my family lived two houses away from a very long hill that was about a quarter of a mile long.  The snowfall was so great and the flakes were just the right kind (because there are numerous types of snow) that something exceptional happened.  When the plows came through and packed the accumulation down, a fantastically perfect base for a high-speed adventure was created.  This opportunity was impossible to pass up!

My smaller Flexible Flyer wooden sled with the metal runners begged to be ridden.  In concept, it was great, but it dug in too deeply into that type of snow.  It wasn’t the right option for the day’s conditions. However, on such a grand occasion, my father didn’t want my friends and I to be disappointed.  He knew of a better option.

Dad permitted me to pull out the much-coveted toboggan. We were the only family in the neighborhood who had one. Four gleeful little girls on one sled would have such fun!  Perhaps he didn’t think we would be quite as adventurous as we were.  Perhaps, however, he did.

Girls just want to have fun in the snow!  Snow day in Maple Valley, Washington (February 2012) 

I should mention that I grew up in the era when there was no such thing as helicopter parents or snowplow parents.  We were Gen X: The Free-Range Generation.  If streetlights weren’t on, lightning wasn’t crashing, or tornado sirens weren’t blaring, we were allowed to roam wherever we wanted in our neighborhood.  This is how my friends and I learned personal responsibility, natural consequences and on that day, some fundamental laws of physics.

With our multi-layered-mittened hands, three of my friends and I eagerly dragged my very long toboggan out of my garage, down the snow packed road, across the vacant street, and to the precarious crest of the very long hill.  Four little tomatoes in four pairs of cushy snow pants lined up across its spine - legs wrapped around the waist of the rider in front of her, ready for a ride.  Back and forth we pumped our torsos, heaving and thrusting to encourage the big sled forward. Earnest tries weren’t sufficient as our combined weight sunk us down into the snow and we only advanced a few unimpressive inches.

Left alone, perhaps natural consequences would have been a sufficient teacher for us girls that day.  Gravity, energy, friction and most importantly Newton’s First Law of Inertia:  An object at rest will remain at rest until…

An external force causes it to move……

Newton’s Second Law regarding force was also part of the lesson plan that day: the acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the net force acting on it and inversely proportional to its mass.  In simpler parlance, if the neighborhood boys pushed us, the toboggan would make it down the hill.

The clever and eager-to-assist boys obviously were a lesson ahead of us because without being asked, numerous heaving hands impulsively pushed us forward in our education.  Their generous shoves and eager running effortlessly launched the girl-laden taboggan on its fateful virgin journey down the very long hill.  (Did I fail to mention that none of us had ever used a toboggan before?...)

As I’m writing this, I can feel the freezing wind rushing past my chill-chapped cheeks and my adrenaline excitedly rising to the occasion.  The boys were cheering.  Us girls were laughing.  And an impending six-foot snowbank beckoned in devilish delight.

There was no steering wheel on that toboggan. Experienced riders understand that by leaning to the side, you can encourage a toboggan to veer in your hoped direction.  Unexperienced riders, we realized in the thick of the moment that we didn’t know what the hell we were doing as inertia drew us towards a tall wall of destiny, which was diabolically screaming, “You will be mine!”

The boys’ screams changed in tone from excited to alarmed as they chased us down the very long hill.  “Turn!  Turn!!!” they urged in panic.  However, the closest thing to a steering wheel on the toboggan was a rope which did absolutely nothing.

An adjunct lesson of the day was Newton’s Third Law, which we figured out not a second too soon.  For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So, when one object exerts a force on a second object, the second simultaneously exerts a force of equal magnitude and in the opposite direction on the first.  For example, if four little girls slam into a snowplow-packed snowbank, they’re going to violently bounce off like little, red rubber balls.

“Break!  Break!!” the geniuses yelled after us, hoping there was another way to avert what appeared to be an inevitable disaster.  But my toboggan had no built-in breaks - only four tiny pairs of little red rubber boots that were clamped in fear around the waists of those in front of them.

It’s vernacular knowledge that women have great instincts.  Somehow during the countdown to this crisis, my fellow female riders and I simultaneously realized that if we shifted our weight in the opposite direction of the snowbank, we could avoid a collision.  With momentary relief, we merely missed the wall of doom and continued our way at a nice clip down the very long hill.

Did I mention that this snowbank was only about a quarter of the way down the quarter mile long, very long hill?  Or that the hill terminated at a drop off - a ditch about 30 feet deep?

Our next organic lesson of the day was Newton’s Principle of Superposition of Forces: if multiple forces act on an object, the total force is the vector sum of all the individual forces.

For example, if you dig your heels in as hard as you can into a heavily packed snow base with your little, red rubber boots (lined with slippery bread bags) while you’re careening over it at 3,000 miles an hour, and combine that force with that of your three little friends who are outfitted in their little red rubber boots (lined with slippery bread bags) who dig in as hard as they can, the sum of all 8 little determined feet slamming into the heavily packed snow with all their might is just sufficient enough to avoid an ass-over-teacup situation at the bottom of a very long hill.

The frenzied boys couldn’t quite keep up during the decent, but we could hear their cautionary screams from behind us.  As we came to a merciful halt, their “Stop!  Stop!!!”  paused, followed by a frantic peppering of, “Run!  Run!!”  The boys hauled their tomatoes up the very long hill, realizing they were in some very deep doo doo.  As I’m writing this, I can feel my very wet bangs stuck to my forehead under my pompom knit hat.  I can feel the fibers from my spit-soaked-screamed-in scarf stuck on my little chapped lips.  Exhausted, us four survivors dragged the very long sled up the very long hill and collapsed in a very deep snow drift in my front yard.  Four tired girls flopped inside to repose by the fire, dry off, and wrapped our cold little hands around blissful cups of hot cocoa.

Luckily for the boys, all of us were good little Catholic girls.  The last lesson of the day was religious.  My mother’s wisdom came from the Bible - Romans 12:19 - which basically states, “Don’t take revenge.  Leave room for God’s wrath.”