One of my biggest bellyaches about snow is that it is exceedingly boring. It’s just one color...EVERYWHERE. If snow were orange, or purple, or some other interesting hue, I might not detest it as much as I do.
I was, in fact, conceived during the gnarly Blizzard of ‘49, so snow should be my friend. But in the intervening years, snow has tried to kill me and/or my cows every winter. So yeah, I hate snow.
Jesse Winchester wrote this song about snow that speaks for me. You might relate.
My first memories of snow are as a toddler, bundled up like some sort of Eskimo mummy with clunky boots, cartoon mittens and a wool scarf. I was sent outside to play in the snow, but I couldn’t move. I was only able to stand there in the cold wind, snow up to my chin, and utter a childlike curse, “Screw this!”
Years later, while feeding cattle from a hay-sled behind a team of horses, my condensed breath freezing my beard and my eyeballs icing over, I uttered the more adult version of that same curse.
I remember my granddad once telling me that the bleakest day in Wyoming history was when the first draft horses were brought into the state. He said that allowed ranchers to put up hay to feed their stock during winter, and convinced folks that it might be a good idea to stay here when the whole damn place is iced over.
When I moved to Corpus Christi in the early years of the new millennium, the snow followed me. That Christmas, snow fell on Corpus for the first time since the Cretaceous. Little neighborhood kids were attempting their first snowball fight, the fronds of the palm trees were bent under snow and everyone said it looked so pretty.
I merely thought, I can’t get away from this cold, white crap. It’ll follow me no matter where I go.
Snow almost killed me at the Remount a few years ago. The summit was covered in drifts and the whiteout lasted for days. It was all I could do to keep the longhorns fed, and it took all day. I’d get back to the house exhausted.
I ran out of Copenhagen, and the roads were still impassable. I was jonesing so hard, I seriously considered fashioning a pair of snowshoes from willows and rawhide, then post-holing a few miles through the blizzard to the gas station at Buford to score some Copenhagen and keep from going insane.
Had I yielded to that temptation, the only way to find my carcass would have been to wait for the snow to melt in the Spring, then look for the circling buzzards.
With apologies for all the winter sports enthusiasts out there – the skiers, the boarders and the snowmobilers – I lost any romantic notions about snow a long, long time ago.
Perhaps it’s sacrilege to say that, when snow is the only thing that will put out the voracious wildfires burning in the Big Empty this autumn. This fire season seems to confirm the old adage about wildfire management that you just keep throwing money at a fire until snow falls on it.
But I sincerely believe that hell will not be a hot place. It will be a cold, dead snow-covered ridge-top where the wind never stops blowing and you forgot to put on your long johns.
The reader might ask, “Miller, if you hate snow so much, why do you still live in Wyoming?”
I don’t have enough space left in this column to answer that question.
RodsMillerWyo@yahoo.com
