January 25, 2014: The Snow Squall

A selection from the nature journal I decided to start keeping this year.

            I could see the snow approaching from my vantage point atop Radar Hill. The gray mass of cloud that extended past the horizon was moving down toward me from the northwest. As I looked out across the river valley and to the hills that were nearly three miles away, I saw the falling snow slowly cloak the land. The hills were fading fast. Soon, Athens in the valley below started to fade as the snow moved ever close to me. The hills at this point looked like phantoms hiding in the snow.

            I knew the snow was coming for me, and I was happy; I love snow. It looked like a strong snow storm too, but little did I know what I was about to experience.

            Quickly, before I had even realized it, the hills were gone; standing before me was a wall of white just beyond the trees where the clearing on the ridge ended. It had snuck up on me quickly as I was watching the town slowly be dissolve before my eyes. The flurries around me were growing in size as well. Faster and faster they fell around me, swept into spinning vortexes from the hissing wind.

            Then it hit full force.

            A snow squall unleashed itself all over the hilltop, the clearing, and the forest around me. Suddenly I couldn’t even see where the trees began and where the grass clearing stopped. White was the only thing I could see. The flakes were large too, and upon hitting me stuck immediately. Soon, I began looking more like a snowman than a human.

            As I looked around at my view, or lack thereof, a thought crossed my mind. Here I was, standing on a flat, exposed hilltop, being pelted by snow and biting, singing wind, surrounded by a dome of white; all that seemed to exist at that moment in time was me and my little parcel of universe called Radar Hill. Me and a hilltop. Everything else had simply faded away. It was pure tranquility, pure serenity.

A smile crept across my face; I was at peace. For a moment, nothing bad existed and what did exist was pure life. The swirling snow was exhilarating, pumping energy into the present, filling my life with an unbridled joy that swept across my snow-covered body, leaving me a smiling bundled-up-bundle of life on my little island of existence.

After a while, I decided to start heading back down the trail. I walked down off Radar Hill, which was essentially a relatively small hill on top of a large ridge, and began trudging through the snow on top of the ridge. A few seconds passed on the trail before I decided to look back at Radar Hill. As suspected, I was met with a wall of white; Radar Hill had faded away behind the raging snow.

I trudged on. Stunted second-growth trees began entering my bubble of existence, fading in slowly, coming to a full realization, and then slowly fading back out as the white consumed them. To my surprise, something else faded into my bubble: a group of people, sleds in tow. We greeted each other, and just like that they were gone, faded back into the white, just as how strangers are wont to fade into and out of our daily lives.

After I traveled around a quarter mile from Radar Hill, the snow began to let up. As the snow was slowly decreasing in ferocity, the rest of the world began to reappear before my very eyes. Before long, the snow had ceased and my vision extended as far as the horizon would allow. I entered the forest proper and continued trudging through the snow, which was up over my boots. Silence surrounded me; the only sound was the slight crunch of all that snow under foot. Occasionally a Carolina-Chickadee or Dark-Eyed Junco would break the silence with a sharp call, but soon it all faded back to silence. Snow seems to consume all sounds, leaving the forest, normally a noisy place, devoid of sound.

I trudged on through the forest, toward my home in the town. My adventures were done for that day, but the energy and life I was filled with by the snow would surely stay with me for a long time to come.