More Snow

Five cars stand idle in the cleared and frozen parking lot at Sandy’s. Three of them puff white breath from their exhaust pipes. I never considered leaving the engine running while I go shopping or read a book with a morning omelet, but here the risk of car theft apparently underweighs the discomfort of a cold car. Larry turns his engine off at Sandy’s, but about ten minutes before he is ready to go, he presses a button in his pocket and assures me that his car has started. He offers me a ride, but it’s only four blocks back to my room, and this time I decline. He honks as he passes; I wave, and feel just like a native.

Jerry is busy with the plumbing again today. My room is on the second floor, and a deck runs along all the upper rooms with a stairway at one end. My room is nearest the stairway, and I use a broom to clear the deck near my door and stairway of snow. The rest of the deck has a foot of snow and no footprints. For several weeks, I have been the only person up here. Jerry, who owns the place, discovered a leak during the night before last, which he traced to the baseboard hot water heating system in the second floor. He keeps the heat turned on in the unrented rooms, but still, a pipe froze during the extreme cold we have been having. When it thawed, some of the first floor rooms had minor rainstorms, including the one Jerry, himself, lives in. My room was not affected. Any room left unheated can have frozen pipes within an hour at thirty below zero. In this case, it was a heating pipe in one of the vacant rooms that froze where it passes close to an outside wall, and once it froze, the heat stopped. Jerry would have had a major flood if he had not noticed the problem early. He went about with a hair dryer, blowing warm air on cold pipes. Today a plumber came to repair the break. “We have these problems every winter,” Jerry says.


Today it is snowing, and that makes it a little warmer, minus five and remaining about the same all day. This is the first snow, other than flurries, in about two weeks. The old snow has settled and crusted somewhat, so that walking on it, I usually remain on top where it sounds like walking on an empty oil drum. But sometimes the crust breaks and down I go, two feet to the bottom, or farther if the snow has drifted up. These holes are where I fell through while following a snowmobile track, which had packed the snow and made the going easier.









These deer tracks show that the deer are falling through too. Their small hoofs put more pressure on the snow than my boots do. They cannot run very fast in this kind of snow. Wolves, with their broader paws and lighter weight, can usually run on top of the crusted surface. It must be a nervous time for deer. Maybe that’s why these tracks lead into town where wolves seldom go.