Some people look at snow and see all of its pitfalls: its potential for destruction, its hazards and dangers, its ability to bring small towns to their knees. Some people look at snow and see all its beauty and how it covers all the imperfections in a landscape.
On January 25, 2000, about 13 inches of snow fell at my home in Greensboro.
Raleigh got a foot and a half — it beat the record for 17.8 inches set in 1927. Siler City got 22 inches, and in some areas of the state, more than two feet fell.
The Federal Emergency Management Association called it “the most powerful winter storm to hit North Carolina in 72 years.”
The forecast the night before predicted a dusting to less than an inch. This storm caught everyone by surprise.
My dad, at home in Randolph County, woke up at 3 a.m. Because of the brightness reflecting into the house, he thought it was morning. He got up, and went into the kitchen for coffee, but the coffeemaker hadn’t brewed. He noticed it was cold in the house. He noticed that it was unusually quiet. Cars that normally whizzed down Old Highway 49 were absent. And then he looked outside.
My parents’ den is sunken, and the windows look out at ground level. The snow rose halfway up the windows and stood shin-high in front of the doors. For a moment, my dad — trapped in a house buried in so much snow, by Randolph County standards anyway, he could barely push the back door open — thought surely this was the end of the world. He’d never seen anything like it.
The weight of the snow pulled down power lines and trees; more than a quarter of a million people in North Carolina lost power for a week. Towns shut down. Power crews worked round the clock. My parents lit candles and boiled coffee on the top of their kerosene heater, and they did the only thing they could do: They waited for the sun. They waited for the sun to come out and make it all go away.
And yet, at night, despite the cold and the lack of power and the crack of branches breaking through the silence, when the moon cast its glimmer across my parents’ front yard, it was hard not to be transfixed by the beauty of what was on the ground.
That’s the thing about snow. It dulls most of the senses. It muffles sound, mutes smell. It’s numbing to touch. It masks the landscape with whiteness, rendering everything colorless.
In artist terms, white is the absence of color. But in reality, it’s just the opposite; it’s the culmination of all colors, the swirling together of everything in the light spectrum.
Some people look at snow and see all of its pitfalls: its potential for destruction, its hazards and dangers, its ability to bring small towns to their knees. Some people look at snow and see all its beauty and how it covers all the imperfections in a landscape.
Careful observers see both sides. Nature carries with it the power for calamity and the opportunity for calm.
It’s the culmination — the swirling together of everything, the wild and the tame, the light and the dark — that makes it all so beautiful.
