No Snow Day in Utah

Snow Day In Utah?

Last week an ice storm poured through Utah’s Wasatch Front,

glazing everything in its path with a beautiful, high gloss. Sunday afternoon, the next storm dropped a new, thick layer of snow. As I drove to and from Salt Lake in the breathtaking mess, I searched for words to describe the size of the gorgeous snow globs hitting my windshield. Brain-stunned by their sheer mass, I could only come up with “hamburgers”.

Meanwhile. Viscous snow ruts rose up to throw my VW bug into Wyoming (if I didn’t high-center first). Of the freeway’s multitude of lanes, only two could be discerned, which two lanes were in fact mere tire tracks that tested my faith in the existence of any freeway at all. I made the colossal mistake of edging into the fast lane to pass a crawling caravan—an SUV caught up with and tailgated me (a common strategy meant to intimidate the errant driver off the road and into an asylum). But deep in a belly-tickling rut, I couldn’t return to the slow lane without first slowing w-a-a-a-ay down, lest I roll my bug like a popover on the rut’s mean edge. And slowing seemed risky, with his grill locked on my bumper and flames igniting his eyebrows. Eventually, he gave up his tailgating strategy and swerved around me on the right, glaring and shaking his head at me as he passed. I growled back (oops). My heart was in my throat. I felt like a shaky survivor on the nether side of cataclysm.

The snow recommenced last night; this morning we had nearly a foot more of it.

Frank put chains on his car to take the kids to school this morning.

Because. There are No Snow Days in Utah.

Even the morning after the ice storm, when a step outside meant risking a fall of Looney Tune proportions, school wasn’t canceled; it was delayed two hours (I’m guessing buses couldn’t get enough traction to leave the bus garage). Hearing accounts of children falling on their faces as they arrived at or left school troubled me (I had my own encounter with the ice as a kindergartner…ironically, in Providence, Utah). Doesn’t the school district administration know? I thought. Don’t they get it?

Snow Days are a Gift!

A gift requiring only a margin of benevolence from the giver; a simple, rational gift that not only ensures children’s safety, it provides healthy respite from winter’s dark, mean side. Plus a break from indoor recess.

I loved snow days as a kid.

A blizzard in Nebraska one year piled snow drifts ten and twelve feet deep against windows and doors and trapped residents inside. School was canceled for several weeks. My dad made peanut butter cookies and read Zane Grey novels (violet eyes, heaving bosoms, and all) out loud to as we huddled around the radiator. This memory is one of the sweetest and safest of my childhood. And my education suffered not at all.

One winter in Pocatello, Idaho, the wind blew a chill twenty below day after day…resulting (happily) in almost two weeks of blessed, blessed snow days. We bundled up, taking turns with our one and only pair of moon boots, and burrowed snow tunnels in the front yard, alternating short snippets outside with longer intervals by the wood stove downstairs.

As a teen in Washington State, I’d wake to the soft light and stillness that often accompanies snowfall, and hold my breath. There was a muted, almost magical loveliness in that quiet, pre-dawn anticipation. I would try to guess from my mother’s step whether it was a Snow Day or not. Quiet entrance: she was protecting my sleep, a good sign. If her pace was brisk, the magic died. Time to get ready for school. The school superintendent’s son, one of my classmates–a friendly, entertaining kid with freckles and curly hair–was our chosen Snow Day Advocate. I actually believed our petitions through him were successful; compared to Wasatch Front administrators, George’s dad was Santa Claus.

This morning I chatted with a friend as she shoveled snow out of her driveway (throwing it almost over her head to clear the snowpile). When I expressed my indignation over Utah’s snow day policies, she laughed and said that we’d have school clear into July if Utah did Snow Days. She grew up in Cache Valley, tucked high in the mountains, where snow falls extra thick. She remembers her bus driver declaring her own Snow Day once, realizing, as she drove through blank whiteness, that the telephone poles were on the wrong side of the bus; she was driving in an open field.

And then I remembered my community’s deer antler collectors, and the big tough trucks and four-wheelers and tractors (even Sunday’s aggressive SUV)— all further evidence of grit in the local culture—and realized that Utah’s heritage—left by freezing, starving pioneers determined to bloom in an inhospitable land—persists. I wonder if school administrators are driven by inherited mettle, or if they are simply keeping a psychological tradition long ago established (with amazing results, by the way), never thinking to question its particular relevance to school children on bitter winter days. Or are they trying to keep budgets straight? I don’t know. In the end, though I’m still bummed, and still indignant, I can’t help but admire Utah’s chutzpah.

PS: The third wave of this severe weather system is expected tomorrow: I just got a recorded message from the school district, telling me that tomorrow, they’re letting the kids out a couple of hours early…