El Niño is back. This is the Pacific warm ocean mass that affects the sub-arctic jet stream to where more stormy weather heads into the United States’s interior—which, in winter, can create serious storms, should the arctic jet stream dip down from Canada and meet the other jet stream when it’s carrying significant, disruptive systems.
Meteorologically speaking, that is. Meaning, we’re not talking about an obese man dressed as a flamenco dancer who claims that “All other tropical storms must bow before El Niño,” as Chris Farley had done.
Meaning, we might see some snow, this winter. I’m looking forward to it.
I can’t put my finger on why I’m hoping to see snow. Not at this point; maybe in further paragraph I might. It may be because it would be like taking a vacation, without paying the airfare or the gas.
I haven’t seen much snow for some time, now. Seeing snow again would be like going to some exotic place without having to leave home. The snow transforms my backyard landscape—and my neighbor’s, and that of the neighborhood, and of the county—into someplace familiar, yet not.
When that happens, the land looks like what I know, or once knew, but turned to a world somewhat buried and white, as pure as the driven snow, suddenly untrodden and clean. Perhaps this is why we’re told that though our sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow (Isaiah 1:18). We shall be pure, clean, untrodden.
Nowadays, I’m feeling trodden-upon. I need some snow to remind me of God’s transformative power. The snowfall provides a visual of what God would do within us, if we let him.
Snow appears this way and it sounds a certain way, as in a recording studio. The soft, white, layered carpet absorbs the ambient sounds, as such a studio would.
A snow-carpeted landscape is a reminder of falling in love. Falling headlong for another creates a kind of hush, especially when people all over the world pair off and fall for each other, putting the world’s worries aside for a time, to enjoy the excitement of being with another who will protect, comfort, and fill them as never before.
I love my home and I love my wife, and I love being with her at home. I also love going with her to places unexplored—at least by us. If it’s new to us, it seems brand new, because we’re exploring places new to us, broadening our horizons along the way.
This is what snow can do. It transports us to places that looks familiar yet no longer are. It would even transport us to a time.
Snow transports me to a magical Christmas. It conveys me to a time not unlike what’s shown in the film where the kid begs for a Red Rider BB Gun.
My parents spent a bundle. My dad bought me a Stingray bicycle, the kind with the banana seat and the monkey handle-bars.
He was so excited about me getting it that he captured the moment I first beheld it on his eight-millimeter home-movie camera—the bike in all of its pristine vinyl and stainless-steel glory, and me in my yellow flannel pajamas, bed-head and all. Like in the Hollywood movie, it had snowed the night before.
It had snowed, but I didn’t let that stop me taking it for a spin. After every Christmas present was opened and breakfast eaten, I traded PJs for jeans, sweatshirt and a jacket and went riding on the newly plowed street. I quickly wiped out, got cold, and went home, but not before I appreciated that moment of snowy Christmas magic sponsored by my loving parents.
This is why the potential for a snowy winter—or, at least one with some snow—takes this author to a certain place. It takes me to where the Stingray bike once took me, and still takes me: where Robert Browning’s Pippa exclaimed, concerning another season:
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in His heaven,
All's right with the world!
Not often we can say with our hearts that all is right with the world. As I was growing up, I said it infrequently. Only one other time comes to mind, one when it seemed as though all was right and nothing could go wrong.
Growing up in Central New Jersey was akin to being raised in a jungle, where kids like me were as Kipling’s Mowgli, looking for his Baloo to take them under their wing. That part of the state was populated by those who had left their dog-eat-dog, urban existence to transplant their dog-eat-dog attitudes to the suburbs.
My older brothers and parents adapted well to suburbia, after fleeing Bayonne’s urban environs, as the one was essentially the other, yet slightly more spacious. These family members seemed to relate well to dogs eating dogs.
For my part, in the more spread-out setting of Somerset County, I felt like a fish out of water. It was no less a jungle as the city had been.
Welcome relief came when my parents bought a hundred-acre farm in rural Russell, Pennsylvania. Russell was a suburb of Warren, a suburb of Erie.
My dad had done with his farm as people sometimes do in South Jersey, the civilized part of the state. He bought the farm, quite literally, and rented the land out to a farmer, so that guy could work it. The tenant farmer did his thing, while the owner collected the rent, and his kids enjoyed the experience.
Well, this kid enjoyed the experience. His brothers and mom did not. They were city slickers at heart, which is why Russell-time didn’t last very long.
While our time in northwestern Pennsylvania did go on for a little while, your narrator got to see the wonder of birth, a calf coming into this world. I also got to ride on the tractor as it spread the manure around, in anticipation of the next growing season.
Before that season came winter, the time when the lake-effect snows waited not for El Niño. These were self-starting snows that didn’t bother with Pacific temperatures; they had all the moist fuel they needed.
That Russell winter was my childhood’s best. It involved lots of sledding—and the new friends I could quickly and easily make from that shared experience. They didn’t come from the jungle but from neighboring farms.
The sledding occurred all over the place, even on the street. Mainly, we would slide down the hill in back of the house, alongside the barn and down to the creek in back of the barn.
Some of the sledders were on actual sleds; others were on inner tubes, which offered no ability to steer. The trick was to not go into the creek. Most of us, most of the time, successfully managed to turn that trick, to make use of the phrase in its classical sense. Others weren’t so lucky. But all of us had fun.
The creek had pure mountain water running through it. It was clear and clean enough to drink.
The creek down the hill from my parents’ house—as well as the snow, the farmhouse, and the barn—were all icing on the cake-top for this idyllic winter setting. Now, some fifty years beyond it, all the stationary pieces and every moving part have molded a montage of the mind that takes me back to one winter, a time when the stress of living in the jungle was no longer a thing.
These things—and the current-day snow that triggers their memory—transport me to a time when civilized, rural Pennsylvania gave me permission to just be a kid. In that time, I had the freedom to just “Go outside and play!” as my mom would say.
For, in that place seemingly made for play, opportunities to do so abounded. Back in Central Jersey, play mainly consisted of figuring out how to distract from the tedium and apprehension the jungle evoked. It was about avoiding bullies, avoiding trouble—with them or with parents—or helping other kids to avoid trouble, as allies were sometimes created from bullies.
In Central New Jersey, unlike the south, life was about whose turf was whose. In Pennsylvania, there was plenty of turf to go around, so no one cared much about the concept of personal turf. In the rural playground, then and now,
The mapled Russell hills covered with snow
Serve to bring old childhood into manhood,
Where decades of yesteryear plant and grow
Into barnyards of mem’ries understood
To bring comfort in knowing there’s a place
Where loathsome jungle underbrush is cleared,
Where the mind’s solace cannot be displaced,
Where city’s dog-eat-dog need not be feared.
The sleds, creek and barn, the calf and new friends
Occupy rooms in a mem’ry palace
Inviting visits as through one’s own mind’s lens,
Now refracted as by borealis.Yet, one must not take up residence there.
As we’d live in that place beatific,
And make it into a predator’s snare,
Turning the sublime to the horrific,
Turning to a personal Willoughby,
Forgetting what R Frost was sure to keep:
Promises and commitments, by and by,
With miles to go before we can sleep.
Adulthood intrudes upon childhood,
As the latter comes along for the ride
Whenever I see charming, snowy woods,
Wondering Can I go for just one more slide?He who led Moses in the wilderness
Gives greater perspective than the heart shows.
The muse of David brings a tenderness,
A point of view deeper than any snow.
To Job he had asked the pointed question:
“Have you entered the storehouses of snow?”
And Job’s response was but pure confession
Of just how little he really did know—
Which means Russell must be in perspective;
For, while delightful, there’s very much more;
While it’s nostalgic, it’s quite subjective,
And Yehoveh has so much more in store.
The snow of days gone by, tickled by snow of now, makes for poetic waxing. But I must recall I can only glance back at the dead and buried past, lest it overtake the living present and then corrupt today’s promises, disturbing the day’s commitments.
I ought not fixate. Yet, I do wax poetic. I can hardly help it.
This is because I appreciate what Andrew Klavan, in The Truth and Beauty, has described as “a chain of collaborative creation.” This is a chain that operates when the natural elements of the world around us stir the muse to create “all the elements of delight” that invite others to be likewise delighted in their experience of the verse.
Klavan says that the experience of communion is likewise poetic, much like the thought of coming snow can take us to past snowy comfort and glee. As communion goes, Klavan notes,
the elements of bread and wine are cocreated by human experience from a physical goodness into a spiritual goodness—the spiritual goodness of the Logos, the structure of God’s creation that God declared was good.
While Klavan looks at this process as a chain, it may be more akin to a cycle. God has created the natural world from the word of his mouth. And God said, “Let there be light” (Gen. 1:3); he spoke and then what was in the heavens was manifest in the natural.
Man, likewise a manifestation of God within the natural world, was also God-breathed. The Lord God formed, man, dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (Gen. 2:7).
Man creates from the natural world—other natural things or poetic things—and takes inspiration from that world. He can then use that inspiration to glorify God, or himself, or any number of other things.
Klavan’s example of an inspired artist moved by the natural world to participate in this chain of collaborative creation is the English poet William Wordsworth. In the poet’s “A Whirl-Blast from behind the Hill,” Klavan tells of how the poet had “take[n] refuge in a grove surrounded by evergreen holly trees”:
A Whirl-Blast from behind the hill
Rushed o’er the wood with startling sound;
Then—all at once the air was still,
And showers of hailstones mattered round.
…
The leaves in myriads jump and spring,
As if with pipes and music rare
As Klavan tells us, the “hailstorm creates all the elements of a poem, but it requires a poet … to see the jumping leaves as a party of fairies dancing to the music of Puck—Robin Goodfellow—the chief sprite of the woods.”
That is, Wordsworth was magnificent in his wordsmithing, but not so much in his God-glorifying. Were he to have given God the glory and not directed the reader to medieval mythology, he might have continued the cycle.
Wordsworth might have used his elements of delight to inspire the reader to look upward and not downward; he may have inspired readers to look away from the emotional appeal of the purely natural and its legendary creatures, and toward the spiritual appeal of “He [who] shines in all that’s fair; [Because] in the rustling grass I hear Him pass.”
Wordsworth might have, but he did not. He could have said, “He speaks to me everywhere,” but he did not. Another would pen such a phrase.
To direct inspiration toward God and to invite others to be likewise inspired—as the Reverend Maltbie Davenport Babcock did, when he wrote “This is My Father’s World, quoted above—is to turn the chain into a cycle. It is to invite God to further speak to us, that we might be further inspired.
Wordsworth directed his inspiration along the horizontal axis, outwardly. His was a dead end, falling on the ears of the spiritually dead. Babcock’s was directed upwardly, toward his and nature’s creator, he who would never die.
This is what the thought of snow does. For me, at least.
The snow reminds me not only of olden days, “Happy golden days of yore.” It reminds me of he who gives snow like wool, scattering frost like ashes (Psalm 147:16).
Snow inspires me to think of how the jungle was tamed by a land covered in white, as our sins—once red—turn white, to have our hearts’ jungles tamed by the Muse of David, Jehovah-Maccaddeshem, the God who sanctifies.
Kevin, perhaps comparing you to the apostle Paul's descriptive style of writing will convey my thoughts on your Snow story.
As I was reading, I found myself transported to that time of innocence and simple fun, when kids had nothing to fear and simply enjoy life. You took me back to my days of sledding, except that, instead of a snow hill, we would sled down a green plush hill of grass on a cardboard box in Costa Rica.
Thank you encouraging and blessing me with your writings which are also educational. Your audience on this platform may be few, but the hearts you touch are huge.