Thoughts on Snow

The Scottish people have 421 words for snow. The Inuit culture has 40 to 50 words. Of course we have snow, sleet freezing rain and a myriad of other words as well.

I have always loved snow, and look forward to it each year. This year it didn’t arrive until Friday. As I looked outside at the landscape blanketed in white, I thought how peaceful and quiet it looked. It was a winter wonderland, only to be lost today by freezing rain and ice.

I grew up in Toronto, before climate change. There was more snow then (perhaps even now) than we have in Harrisburg. I picture myself as a child walking in snow that came to my waist.
I never knew what lay ahead of me as a child and what snow might mean to me in the future. Back then it was something to play in, to go sledding with my friends or to build snowmen outside.

I fell in love with a man who loved the north. I mean the far north! Although he grew up in Pennsylvania, he had lived in a small village, called Kivalina.t was on a barrier island eighty three miles above the Arctic Circle. When I started to date this man, I knew that if I married him, I might live in Kivalina, so far in the north.

After seven months of dating, my future husband, Ernest Burch (known as Tiger) asked me to marry him. I hesitated at first, did I really want to live above the Arctic Circle? Could I even do it? Being young, I didn’t think about his proposal for very long. I said yes, not knowing what I would get into when we lived above the Arctic Circle. Anyway, I decided, we wouldn’t’t be living there for two years and that was a long way in advance.

We lived in Chicago for seven months after we married. I experienced the coldest weather I had ever been in! It seemed as though there was snow on the ground from December to mid-February; that didn’t prepare me at all for the snow and cold In Kivalina.

We arrived in Kivalina in mid-May. The snow was up to the windows of the houses and up to my waist as well. The ocean was still a frozen mass of ice, covered with snow. You could hardly distinguish the land from the sea. Slowly, the snow melted. By the time of the midnight sun, it had almost disappeared. Yet, the cold lingered on. This photo was sent to me by Sonja Barger.It is a photo of our house taken in 2021. I took out the power lines as we had no electricity but this is what the house looked like when we arrived in 1964 

We had a brief respite from the wintery weather: the land turned green and wild flowers popped up all over the place. By late October, it was winter again. The ocean started to freeze. I remember thinking what fun it would be to skate across the ice to the mainland. The snow had blown off the ice and when the sun shone the ice reflected the colors of the sky with peaches, lavender and blue. It was a magnificent sight, something I had never experienced before!

By the time mid-November arrived the snow was once more up to my waist. Instead of all day light, I started to experience all day darkness and felt hemmed in by the ever present snow. After Thanksgiving, Tiger took me on a camping trip and it was then that I found out how deadly snow can be. It was 35 below and on the third day of our camping trip, the tent burned down. We were left in the middle of nowhere surrounded by snow. It was a camping trip that we were lucky to have survived. (To read more about this, read my memoir: Journey Through Fire and Ice (available at Amazon.)

This year I was told by some of the natives, whom I correspond with in Kivalina, that often people bury themselves in the snow when they are stranded in the middle of nowhere. The snow insulates them and the hope is that they will be found. I don’t know if Tiger knew that this was a way to survive and I don’t know if I could have done it anyway.

In 1969, after spending snowy and cold winters in Winnipeg, we took our two daughters to live in Kotzebue. We went out every day in the winter, ignoring the cold and the snow. Karen and Sarah seemed to thrive up there. As the days grew longer in mid-February, they would play outside, trying to make snowballs. The snow was too soft and snow angels became the thing to do. The snow seemed to last forever and then suddenly, in early April, puddles started to appear and spring arrived.

I often think back on those early years, when the children were small. They experienced the fun of all that snow has to offer- sledding, ice skating and tobogganing. When we moved back to Winnipeg, we had a small skating rink. David, at the age of three, would skate on it hockey stick in hand. Karen and Sarah also loved our little rink. Tiger often made the children igloos out of frozen chunks of snow. The winters there were always cold with plenty of snow on the ground.

Moving to Harrisburg, life was different. I learned to cherish snow days , when the schools were closed. Life seemed to come to a standstill, as the snow fell gently to the ground and left everything a blanket of white. Winters were not like they had been in Winnipeg or in Alaska. As the years went by, it seemed as though we had less and less snow.

When we moved to Harrisburg we decided to spend a few days, between Christmas and the New Year, at our winterized cottage that we have in Canada. We often escaped the brown land of Harrisburg hoping for a land of white further north. Often we would wake in the morning and watch the snowflakes drifting lazily to the ground and covering the lake in a blanket of white. Winter picnics with friends, cross country skiing and tobogganing filled our days. At night we would sit in front of the fire enjoying hot chocolate or hot toddies. It is a time I look back on wishing those days had never ended.

All over, climate change has arrived. The snow arrives in Kivalina later and later and this year, the ocean didn’t freeze until early December. Here the temperatures have been warm — well above freezing, and when Friday arrived bringing with it nearly five inches of snow, it was a day to treasure.

Happy New Year to all. May your life be filled with love, health and happiness.