Snow stories

This morning the boss and I got to regaling Alan with stories of winters we experienced as children and young adults. The years between the time I was about fifteen (and he nineteen) and the time I turned 28-ish included some staggering winters. There was a spell when I was living in one town and milking cows for a farm in another when the weather had to be experienced to be believed.

I had to be at work every day at five AM, so I left home around 4:30. That winter we had nearly a month when temps never got above twenty and at least a week of nights that reached thirty below. I drove a little Volkswagen station wagon sort of thing. It was an early example of front wheel drive and would go anywhere you pointed it. It was also a typical VW so the heater was dead. We used a little catalytic space heater to "warm" (warm being a relative term, resembling the comparison of scale of perhaps Vesuvius and a cigarette lighter, with "warm" being the lighter and comfortable being the volcano) it up and defrost the windows.


I would go out every morning at four or so and light the darned thing (with a match-it had an open, circular "wick" which was quite exposed), then go back inside for more coffee. If I propped it on the seat just so, it would sort of thaw a hole in the frost on the windshield so I could drive to work. It wasn't exactly ideal, but there isn't a lot of traffic at that time of day anyhow. I never missed a milking.

Then there was the blizzard that hit when I was living in the camp in Caroga Lake. (No insulation, one layer of simple board walls-it was a SUMMER camp after all). I don't remember exact weather statistics, but I probably was commuting to the same farm (I worked there a long time before I met the boss). During the night we got feet and feet and feet of snow, howling winds, temps way below zero...it was like living in Alaska. The little sheet steel wood stove in the living room (sole heat source) was a joke in the face of such weather. We didn't have running water though, so there was really nothing to freeze but us. Sometime during the maelstrom, while all occupants slumbered (including dogs) the front door of the cabin blew open. When we awoke in the morning we had to shovel two feet of snow out of the living room. (And you wonder why I refuse to get all excited about global warming.) At that point we accepted an invitation from some friends who had an apartment in the city and stayed with them for a few days.


The boss's stories of winter wildness included taking water upstairs at night so he could have a drink if he was thirsty and finding it frozen in the morning. Icy winds howling through the walls. Snow that the biggest tractor on the farm couldn't get into, let alone out of.


I have other memories of driving that same VW with that same stupid heater to that same job in an ice storm. There was simply no way the car could go on the roads themselves, which were like a long, black hockey rink. Still I had to go to work, as I loved my job and my employer's cows needed to be milked. So I put one tire on the snow bank and crept off to Johnstown where 150 Holsteins awaited. Never missed a milking then either.


We were nuts. We drove bad cars (I had one that you had to park on a hill to start and a truck with two leaky tires, which I swapped twice a day to get to and from work-I could change tires better then any girl I knew) and lived in frighteningly primative places. However, we were young, intrepid and didn't really know any better. And it was a real good preparation for marrying a dairy farmer. I fit right in from the day I got here.