The Snow Mountains of Youth

I can remember one day, maybe 40 years ago, when I fell off a snow drift in my backyard that seemed at least twenty feet high. Maybe it was. Maybe my young mind just viewed it that way. Whatever the reason, I spent years telling my children truly awful snow stories. So convinced was I that we (my generation) received more snow on a more regular basis. In my mind, kids today hadn't seen "real snow." Remember it? It would come up over the damned roof of the house. It was so high, you could jump off the roof of your house and land safely in a snow drift below. Yes we had days like that. I think now, though, they were a bit exaggerated, like a war story. If the statistics are correct, todays kids see approximately the same amounts of snow, if not more. And they have additional problems we didn't have to deal with - problems like the 200 million more people trying to get around in that stuff. Everywhere you go the population is at least twice as large as it was when I was a kid.

Two-hundred million more people. Millions of more vehicles on the road. Millions of more miles of roadway. Thousands of more homes and schools and stores, all needed to be shoveled out. Boomers don't think about the transformation that has taken place in population. So when we hear that kids don't have school tomorrow because they are expecting eight inches of snow, we can't understand it. That's not a lot of snow. Well, as it turns out it is a lot of snow when twice the number of people are trying to get through it.

You see, it really was true that they sent the Boomer generation to school when there was more than a foot of snow on the ground. They did this all the time. Jack Chase of WBZ, Boston would read the school closed notices and he had that smirk, you just knew that he wanted you to go to school. And beside, you could put some snow gear on and be in school in 15 minutes. What was the problem? The school busses drove around with large chains on their tires and there were only one-third the number of busses out there on the road as there are today.

Places to park were everywhere, because we only had half the people who exist now. And the reason the snow seemed so vast and deep was because there were so many open fields for it to fall into. Today, there are buildings, businesses and housing and parking lots in those fields. The snow isn't as apparent unless you are living there and have to shovel it out of the way.

Plows came out at night and there were not as many of them. Of course there were also only half the roadways we have out there today.

There does seem to be more respect for the safety of children than there was in our day. But our parents thought we were indestructible, I guess. Either that or they were trying to kill us. We had bus drivers who were worse than French drivers in a traffic jam. Bus drivers taught me how to swear. We also had our eyes on that back emergency door on the bus and an open dare for anyone to open it and jump out at the next stop. Someone did eventually and was thrown out of school for a week and banned from the bus for life.

The other night I was watching a story on a local news station about how school superintendents make the decision to cancel classes due to snow accumulation totals.. It was almost too much for me. There was one guy who said he sets his alarm for 4 AM and listens to the National Weather Service. Another super said making the snow cancellation decision is one of the most important parts of his job. Okay, this is new. This didn't happen when I was young. School superintendents still made the call, sure, but they didn't obsess over it. Maybe the reason they didn't allow themselves to become too wired over the whole thing was because there were so few of us as compared to today Or maybe, they were WWII veterans who thought it wasn't exactly Normandy outside because there was a foot of snow on the ground and we ought to be able to get to school. Hell, some of these men ran through live machine gun fire.

It is a combination of both of these things I guess - new respect for the safety of children, and double the population.

Parents tend to obsess (or care more, depending on your point of view) and having twice the population just makes it twice as difficult to get around in the snow, to park, to clear sidewalks, to get to fire hydrants.

We did have some horrible snow years back then. And we did get the day off once in a while.But we never got so many days off that we had to extend the school year. To avoid that, we would have taken dog sleds to school.