To be a meteorologist in the Roanoke Valley is not a profession I would care for. There’s something about our mountains, our topography, which often sends the most scientific weather prognostication into a tailspin. But in mid-February, 2014, the weather service got it dead on, as a hammer takes a nail flush to the plank. A storm was coming… a big one.
I have a standing reservation to the Men’s Room about 5:00 each morning; this owing to a cantankerous prostate.
This morning, at that hour, not even light outside, I heard a solitary birdcall. “Well,” I thought sleepily, “That little guy is getting his day off to an early start. Maybe the snowfall has finally stopped. But as I had no urgings to emulate his industry, I went back to bed.
But when I awoke, my suspicions were confirmed. The snowfall had finally ended, but not before delivering the third biggest accumulation this area since 1921!
I’d like to tell you some observations about those days, but tell them obverse to the events.
As I said, I went back to sleep, and when I woke up, the snow had indeed stopped falling, and the birds were in full chorus. Time to let the dogs out.
Our four Dobies went out on the porch and tentatively stepped out in the snow. But our dog Thor was overjoyed! He jumped into the shoulder-high snow and began plowing around excitedly. He would bury his head in the stuff, then, like a submarine coming to a battle surface, he would hoist his covered snout, shake it free, only to do it again. He’d never seen snow before, and must have thought, next to Kibbles and Bits, this was the greatest stuff ever invented!
The night before, the storm not yet over, nor showing any signs of being so – the flakes –so large you’d swear you could hear them land – filled my vision. Thanks God, there was no wind. The night was silent.
The storm had begun with but a few tiny, unthreatening flakes; but that proved to be no measure of what was coming. I have often thought that a solitary flake, hitting just so on a ledge of snow could trigger an avalanche; and that, metaphorically, is just what happened. The beginning flakes were no predictor of the coming ferocity, and the birds knew it.
As the snowfall continued, the bright light of day began to relinquish its grasp to the night, I walked outside. Despite the number of birds I saw there, there was no high tangle of birdcalls. The falling snow seemed to have crooned a lullaby to the earth. It was an eerie calm, a discordance compared to the frantic activity of the birds’ feeding.
They are doing what they must to survive. Birds’ only source of body heat is food. [When’s the last time you saw an Oriole in an overcoat?] The principal is simplicity itself: you want more heat, you add more fuel. They eat ravenously, and sing not, for theirs is a mission assumed in deadly earnest.
They gather thus because they sense, in some way we cannot, the coming of threatening weather. They knew the storm would make its way to our door, thus they must prepare or die.
The flakes nearly created a white-out condition; so multitudinous it would take Heaven to count them all. By storm’s end, the snow was belly high to a full-grown deer. When the winds blew, it grew cold enough to freeze off your fingerprints.
Sabrina and I changed our feeding schedule; whereas we normally feed every day, we would now feed twice a day – all the birds’ natural food being covered and beyond reach. We also fed in the late afternoon so the wee creatures – come early morning – would not find their feeders wanting
Finally the snow stopped, but the temperatures and wind-chill served as refrigeration, preserving what lay heavy on the ground. But the temperatures eventually rose and now when the winds blew, it was warm. Sunlight and warmth, sworn enemies of ice and snow patiently began their work.
Over the next week, our dogs romped in what eventually became ankle-high snow, and as I watched, bits of black appeared over the driveway, patches of grass shrugged off the thinning oppression of weight, icy rivulets of melted ice water poured from the roof edges, and shingles began to emerge. The storm and all its heavy baggage had been at last vanquished.
Alas, the signs of a yet-distant Spring.
Another cycle completed, but all in Heaven’s time; all in Heaven’s time…
Look for Lucky’s books locally and on-line: I Swear By Apollo; The Oath of Hippocrates; The Cotillian; A Journey Long Delayed; Campfire Tales; Sabonics; More Campfire Tales; Growing Up In Stephentown; Animal Archives; The Story Teller. The Adventures of Napoleon.
SEE SABRINA’S WILDLIFE WEBSITE: FACEBOOK.COM/SWVA WILDLIFE
– Lucky Garvin
