The Snow Bank

Michael Cain

x

Ignored

says:

When I was a wee lad, in northwest Iowa in the late 1950s and early 1960s, snow typically covered the ground from mid-November to mid-March. Plains/prairies blizzards could build drifts 10-feet tall (or more*). There was always a week where the high was -10 °F.

There was a conspiracy of mothers who would arrange to send** all of the children from about 10 down out to “play” at the same time on days when there was no school. Faced with, say, 5 °F air temperature and a 20 mph breeze but with a 10 foot drift available, children passed along skills for digging snow caves, even to the littles. Five or six children packed into a snow cave could raise the temperature to something fairly tolerable.

* North of town, where the road dipped to cross a creek, a good blizzard could pile snow 20 feet deep across the road. Picture this: a big yellow road grader, with a huge snow blower attachment on the front, with the diesel engine cranked up to where it was screaming, creeping into the drift at a speed easily measured in inches-per-minute, blowing a column of snow 50 feet up in the air. 60 years on, the memory is still sharp.

** Rolled might be a better description. Joint range-of-motion was severely limited :^)Report