Winter Wonderland

The halls of Aberglasney and other University were humming with the whispers of snow. The sky, it seemed, let loose with a fury of Romantic wonderment. Or, rather, for about twenty minutes it spit out tiny white flakes that dissolved before hitting the ground. Nonetheless, several events were canceled on the hill, and I was told by one cancellation to "Be very careful, but to enjoy the snow." Unless there was a car parked outside that hasn't moved or had too many people walk by, one might not have noticed that it snowed. Still, though, there was excitement to be had.

Chicago is not one of the more wintry cities in the world. Juno, St. Paul, Duluth, even Milwaukee probably looks at the few feet a year we get and laugh. In parts of Duluth, which is on the border between Canada and Minnesota, they regularly measure their snow in yards per winter. Chicago, though, does get its fair share of the fluffy white stuff, and it was not unusual in my time as an Illinoisan to wake up and see the world literally enveloped in a thick later of white stuff. Snow would pile on any stationary object: cars, trees, mailboxes, etc. It was magical. So I found it hard to get excited about snow that melts before anyone gets a chance to measure it's depth. The salt trucks would have gone out during the slow times and plastered the highways, and most people would have muttered under their breath about how annoying and unnecessary it was, ruining the paint jobs on cars.

I'm always amazed at how places are completely unready for snow. In Maryland, when it snowed they closed the highways. When the blizzard hit DC last year, no one knew what to do. Things we closed for weeks. Carbondale was like that. At the beginning of the year, when SIU was encased in ice, the maintenance crews would diligently get out and spread the salt around. Then, in late January, when the sky was still letting lose a hell-storm of ice, there would be no more salt, so instead, the crew would spread burnt coal everywhere. This would not only make the snow more slippery, but then would coat everything in a fine, black film that was impossible to get out of the cuffs of pants. It happened every year: they would close the free parking lot, spread coal everywhere, and then wait until February when the weather got slightly warmer. Then there would be hip-deep puddles of sooty water covered in a thin layer of ice just waiting for benighted, well dressed grad students to fall into them.

Aberystwyth is sort of the same way. Its December, so everyone should expect two things: 1) cold weather; 2) precipitation. Now, I have written blogs before about water and the Celsius scale, which is popular over here, so the British should be aware of what low temperatures and water make. Still, the hill was remarkably treacherous as I made my way down, particularly because it had rained eight hours ago, and the sky had cleared by the time I was making my way down the hill. I would have expected all precautions to have been made, particularly on the massive hill that most people in Aberystwyth have to use at some point in the day.

I was sadly mistaken, and found that out in the most unpleasant way possible: with a backpack full of mostly glass Christmas presents. The ice was not very thick, but as anyone who has ever gone outside in the winter knows, it doesn't need to be very thick or very deep to still be slippery. In fact, a thin coating of damp ice is more dangerous that deeply frozen ice, a few inches thick.

By this afternoon, the ice had melted and refrozen into a thin, highly polished danger zone, turning the walk down the hill into a down-hill ski race in my sneakers. I've never tried walking across an ice-arena tilted at a forty-five degree angle wearing special boots of greased ball bearings, but I imagine it would be similar to walking down the hill in this afternoon's conditions. Every time I slipped, and there were several times, I reached out into the air around me, willing myself to find stability in the loose collection of gaseous molecules circulating around me. Which, let me tell you, looks smooth. There is no way to not look cool flailing on what looks to be slightly damp concrete.

And I'll say this about snow in Aberystwyth: seeing the beach covered in snow is an odd experience. Maybe it's because my family and I go to Virginia fairly regularly that I have come to associate sandy beaches with warmth and sunshine, but seeing small little snowy piles on sandy beaches is disconcerting. My friend Jamie said it was like living in a post-apocalyptic war zone, and those are really just piles of ash. Honestly, that makes more sense to me than snow on beaches. I am more comfortable believing that a nuclear bomb went off, showering the world in a thin layer of choking ash than I am to believe that frozen water drops collected on where I used to lay in my bathing suit.

In short: don't live in Illinois - it does strange things to your sense of perception.