Road Apples
Dec. 21, 2009


 There's no business like snow business

By Tim Sanders

When I was a kid in Michigan, we had lots of snow days. Snow days weren’t just days when we had snow; we had snow most days from early August through late June. No, snow days were days when it snowed so hard that school was cancelled because no one could locate the bus garage. And in a region where new school buses all came equipped with hydraulic snow plows up front and several dozen bags of rock salt strapped to the roof, we’re talking a lot of snow. If there was three or four feet of new snow on the ground in the morning, we always turned on the radio to see if our school superintendent, had done his duty and cancelled classes. We didn’t have to make up those days at the end of the school year because blizzards were considered by the state as “Acts of God” (back then we were blissfully unaware of manmade global drifting).
I used to imagine that God looked down on his chosen children in the Thornapple Kellogg School System and took pity on us. He saw us toiling under the whips of our cruel masters, memorizing multiplication tables and Longfellow’s “Evangeline,” and grew very wroth and said “Let my children go!” Then he smote the county with a plague of heavy lake effect snow, and looked upon what he’d done and said that it was good. Every time school was cancelled, I offered up a sincere prayer of thanks and then went outside to throw snowballs at neighbors shoveling their walks.

When I was a child in southwestern Michigan, being properly dressed for winter included wearing thermal underwear, two pairs of thick socks, rubber galoshes with buckles, snow suits, and mittens which were always attached to my sleeves with little suspenders. There was also the mandatory heavy cap with fur-lined ear flaps, which was designed to make me look simple-minded, like Johnny Carson’s Floyd R. Turbo. Getting dressed to go outside usually took about an hour, and the assistance of a committee of older folks. Once, before I ventured outside, I was warned not to lick cold steel railings or pump handles, due to tongue stickage. It was the kind of warning which ensured that a kid with a truly scientific mind would just have to try it, and I did.

All Michigan children learned at an early age the wide variety of snow activities a healthy young person not yet impeded by any discernable intelligence could engage in.

We threw snowballs at an alarming rate. Snowball fights were seldom planned, and they could erupt instantaneously. You did not necessarily have to recognize the recipient of your snowball. Sometimes just the sight of another idiotic looking figure with one of those silly ear flap caps and galoshes was enough. Older folks, especially men with hats, were also inviting targets. The only real requirement was a nice blanket of wet snow, which we kids referred to as “good packing material.” Once, when my buddy Carlton Adams and I were taken to Grand Rapids to do some Christmas shopping, we spied a Santa outside a department store. He was ringing his bell less than enthusiastically, and looked as though he needed some encouragement. I don’t remember the details of the incident, but later that evening Fred Bowerman, one of our church deacons, called my dad and told him to hurry and turn on the WOOD TV newscast. Dad did, but missed what Fred described as a film showing “Tim and Carlton pelting some poor Santa with snowballs.” The reporter added that those two youngsters were certainly not exhibiting much Christmas spirit. He obviously misunderstood our motives.
And there were snowmen, but once you’d constructed your first ten or twelve snowmen, they lost their charm. The one thing about snowmen that did retain its appeal was finding one in somebody else’s yard, removing his carrot nose, and inserting it in a much lower location on his anatomy. Another snow trick some of my friends and I considered amazingly imaginative required walking halfway across the fresh snow in somebody’s front yard and then carefully stepping backward in our old tracks all the way to the sidewalk. We just knew that the homeowner would see those tracks that stopped mysteriously mid-yard, smack his head and run back into the house to tell his family that somebody had ascended into Heaven just a few yards from their front door. As I may have already mentioned, we weren’t what you’d have called deep thinkers back then.

When the snow was good and dry, sledding was fun, and almost all the kids I knew had a sled, or a saucer, or a cafeteria tray, or something to slide downhill on. Toboggans were also popular. Speaking of which, many years ago, when my family and I moved to Cherokee County, we were unfamiliar with Southern dialect, and were amazed to read in a local paper about a bank robbery in Leesburg.
What amazed us about the robbery was that one of the robbers wore a “toboggan” on his head. My wife and I, both raised in Michigan, were only familiar with the long, wooden toboggans used to transport small groups of people down snowy hills at supersonic speed. We discussed the notion of someone trying to rob a bank with a heavy, wooden sled strapped to his head. We eventually concluded it was either a misprint or some sort of a fraternity initiation. Later someone told us that in the deep South, “toboggans” were what we Michiganders called stocking caps, and added that Michiganders were what Alabamians called idiots.

I’m sure you Alabama children would just love to see some really heavy snow days–the kind we had in Michigan–or at the very least you’d probably appreciate four or five feet of snow on your roof on Christmas morning. But snow does have its downside. Try pedaling a bicycle fitted with tire chains sometime, and you’ll see what I mean.