When I think of Winter
Dec. 29th, 2005 04:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_roseI've been considering doing this since James D. Macdonald put up his post on hypothermia, Cold Blows the Wind Today . He, and several people in the comments (especially answering someone who is moving north soon) tell you all about how to deal with the weather, about the risks and dangers, or the fun of winter (Ice skating in period garb!). But all these dance around the very thing they're discussing the most, assuming that winter is known.
But winter isn't universal.
Winter in a northern city is a strange, twilight season. There's an atmosphere about it I like in spite of my desire to stay warm. A reason I still sometimes walk all or most of the way home.
So many misconceptions about snow, many of them from Hollywood movies where the snow layered on cars etc. is a kind of special effect. There's even a story about one of the movies filmed in Winnipeg, when the real snow was sparse enough that they had to bring in the special effects cotton or whatever it is they use to make it fit. Heh. Fake winter defeated by real winter.
I think I understand the rumoured umpteen Inuit words for snow. The texture and type of snow on the sidewalks, and blowing in the air can mean the difference between a comfortable walk and a sliding misery. How much more so when not knowing what you'll be facing doesn't mean a miserable walk home, but possibly never making your destination at all?
Snow isn't feathery. It's sometimes powdery, sometimes clumpy and uncooperative, but by the time it's in your glove, you've probably begun to melt it and all the other sensations tend to get lost under the unsubtlety of really, really cold water, being made colder by the air. Coarse snow's edges can scrape like pumice if it fell when damp and it's gotten colder, but those first edges melt off fast, and you're left with wet, and a chill that prickles interestingly before it really starts to hurt. (Gloves if you're doing snowballs) Ice tends to have a texture like water over glass – but the glass can be frosted, or scored; anything you can feel from glass, you can feel, at lest briefly, in ice, though ice is heavier and less sharp, and shatters far more often before it cuts. Alas, it's an imperfect comparison even with those caveats; the comparison to glass ignores the all-pervasive chill, and the way the wetness is inherent in the thing, rather than simply run over the surface.
Snow is not a light and fluffy thing, or a thing that makes perfect crunch noises underfoot, or sounds like walking on sand. Or rather, it's not these thigns all the time. For really fresh snow that wasn't wet when it fell, and hasn't softened to stickiness since, the first sounds as one ploughs the feet through it are, well, whuffing. (There's an early, pre-insanity Cerebus where the snow sound effect is "Wuffa-wuffa-wuffa..." it's pretty close, actually.)
But the most common sound I can describe snow makign as you walk through it is a kind of faint groaning squeak, as the foot compresses it. Fuller groans and moans when cars drive over and crush it from loose-packed stuff several inches high to a compact mass about a half-inch deep.
Fluffy, flaky snow is usually sticky and wet, and starts to feel heavy against the boots very soon. It's very very rare to have a snowfall of such kind where the snow comes down in actual neat flakes. Usually, the flakes catch one another and cling on the way down, eaching us in less aesthetic patterns. Snow under really cold conditions is not gentle flakes but little particles more ice than snow-crystal, but far too teeny and painless to count as hail. Deep cold is DRY. There's only a narrow space between the two where the snow may flake but not clump.
It's only when the weather is on the border near melting or just below freezing that you can really make snowballs, though I've seen kids improvise with force-compacted snow, as you get in the snow-plow piles (The danger of that, as some kids have found, is the bits of real ice or of dirt or rocks.)
Tight compacted snow isn't too bad footing, although, becuase it's usually compacted by various sizes of feet, it's not usually even. It can be a bit slick when it's planed perfectly smooth by a plow, but it's a lot safer than some of the uneven, narrow, stomped-down paths I've seen. However. When the weather gets nice, of course, tight-compacted snow melts just a bit more, and fills in the few spaces left. Sometimes it ends up mostly liquid, with clumps of either snow or ice float, and we have the pleasures of slush. When it refreezes, the word for what it is is no longer snow. It's ice.
Ice can be almost clear and utterly smooth, in which case it is dangerous, as it can look like a slightly wet patch and nothing worse. This is black ice, though it's not really black; it's chameleonic, hiding agaisnt the natural colours beneath.
Usually, on sidewalks, it has unmelted snow or dust bits in it, making for some texture (Ah, gratitude), or a fair bit of dirt and streetness, dulling the colour. Or splits and crackles, which separate the layers and let them go frosty whitish. Ice over the surface of a gutter puddle or a sidewalk that can drain usually ends up lifted a bit above the escaping water's surface, which prevents it from becoming any thicker. This thin bit makes the single most satisfying "crack!" in the universe, when you step on the thin surface and break it back down. (It never sounds as good if it's right over the water, or too thick.)
Where the snow isn't packed down, this kind of weather shift can result in a very fine layer of ice-like snow over real snow, and that's when you get the hollywood crunch sound.
Driven snow, the kind that doesn't really settle when it hits ground, but gets blown in ribbons by the wind until it finally fetches up into drifts (So that what the weatherman sedately calls 6 inches of snow ends up with 15 feet of near-bare driveway but a 2 ½ foot drift in front of the garage door)… driven snow hisses. One a slightly friendlier day, it will merely whisper. But driven snow is a dry and deep cold thing. It's rarely friendly. It likes to make its way up the cuffs of slacks, and under collars. It unites with the wind against the brave walker. And it stings a bit. It may start out as flakes, but any decorative patterns are liable to have been torn apart long since, into still smaller bits, the edges worn off. Snowflakes are delicate. Snow is not. (Nobody believes the shape of the asteroid in Armageddon)
Freezing rain can make the world beautiful, even as it makes it more dangerous; freezing rain translates trees to crystal, soft white lawns turn to satin – but the streets it elaves behind turn accidents into likelihoods. Freezing rain loves to turn straight into the "black" chameleon ice. Frost tracing windows and tree limbs is likewise a beauty-maker -- less pretty, but it doesn't make moving vehicles crash.
Snow isn't white. Pristine snow fresh from the sky may be white, as might rooftops, and the untouched centers of lawns. Unless you're lucky enough to catch it at dawn or dusk, when it may be faintly golden, with purple-blue shadows. Or under sodium lights at night, where it's more strongly peach and a darker blue. Even at mid-day, the snow looks white, but the shadows go violet. Lake or river Ice may go green instead. More likely, in the city, the river ice when thin is green-grey-brown streaked with paler bits, when thick, in a light white-grey-brown.
Packed down sidewalk snow is usually slightly tan, a shade reminiscent of the kinds of sand they call white sand. Street snow gets greyish even before the sanders go through. Then it's all brown, and the stuff sprayed onto the ploughed-up snow on the boulevards is crusted in a sandiness of a darker brown shade than you'd expect. As multiple snows and multiple plowings come by, the plough-drifts get built up, and sometimes broken back down, until one can see the geologic layers of winter in the multiplied lines of packed snow, textured ice, and sand.
Slush water is invariably a shade of brown you don't like to see, especially remembering with what glee you, as a kid, waded through a parking lot turned into a many-iceberged lake, even knowing you had good tall boots. (Why the parking lake was so appealing, I don't know, but all the kids loved to splash through it.)
If the snow got damp but hasn't melted into slush, or ice, but there were autumn leaves decomposing on the sidewalk beneath, you get odd pale yellow, or gold-brown, or pale ruddy patches, the colour sneaking up from beneath instead of being deposited from above. (The yellow hue is distinct from the more famous and less natural yellow snow – which I could also describe, but choose not to)
Snow muffles sounds a bit, though not as much as hoods and ear-muffs. But the combinations tends to mean one feels alone on the street more. Distant traffic sounds far more distant than it is, there are fewer sounds of children in yards, fewer neighbours about, and the muffling halves the number you really hear. Your own steps (Squeaking) sound louder without the distractions. The world feels small, your passage feels solitary. The edges of the hood make it almsot claustrophobic, though you're outside.
Because in the cold, the air can hold less moisture, the skies are cloudy more often, even though the air is so dry everything sparks with static. Clear days are often a sign the day will be even colder; there's nothing in the atmosphere holding in the heat.
But I hardly see *day* in winter. The sun sets before I leave work, or in the course of the walk.
Cloudy nights, then, are the norm. Cloudy nights are too bright to call night. The streetlamps reflect off the mounds of snow, which, even where not white, are generally paler than everything they cover. The reflected light is reflected back again by the sky, and bounces once more off the snow, in nature';s own Egyptian mirror trick, until one can walk down a back lane at midnight, and see colour. But still it's not daylight. It's tricksy light, bright enough to surprise you, dark enough for the unseen things to surprise you.
The country of Eternal Twilight.
Needless to say, I'm walking home from work tonight. (Though I'm not a fan of the awful wet of slush). A demain!
(No, my normal writing isn't like this. I don't linger much on setting when I have a story.)
But winter isn't universal.
Winter in a northern city is a strange, twilight season. There's an atmosphere about it I like in spite of my desire to stay warm. A reason I still sometimes walk all or most of the way home.
So many misconceptions about snow, many of them from Hollywood movies where the snow layered on cars etc. is a kind of special effect. There's even a story about one of the movies filmed in Winnipeg, when the real snow was sparse enough that they had to bring in the special effects cotton or whatever it is they use to make it fit. Heh. Fake winter defeated by real winter.
I think I understand the rumoured umpteen Inuit words for snow. The texture and type of snow on the sidewalks, and blowing in the air can mean the difference between a comfortable walk and a sliding misery. How much more so when not knowing what you'll be facing doesn't mean a miserable walk home, but possibly never making your destination at all?
Snow isn't feathery. It's sometimes powdery, sometimes clumpy and uncooperative, but by the time it's in your glove, you've probably begun to melt it and all the other sensations tend to get lost under the unsubtlety of really, really cold water, being made colder by the air. Coarse snow's edges can scrape like pumice if it fell when damp and it's gotten colder, but those first edges melt off fast, and you're left with wet, and a chill that prickles interestingly before it really starts to hurt. (Gloves if you're doing snowballs) Ice tends to have a texture like water over glass – but the glass can be frosted, or scored; anything you can feel from glass, you can feel, at lest briefly, in ice, though ice is heavier and less sharp, and shatters far more often before it cuts. Alas, it's an imperfect comparison even with those caveats; the comparison to glass ignores the all-pervasive chill, and the way the wetness is inherent in the thing, rather than simply run over the surface.
Snow is not a light and fluffy thing, or a thing that makes perfect crunch noises underfoot, or sounds like walking on sand. Or rather, it's not these thigns all the time. For really fresh snow that wasn't wet when it fell, and hasn't softened to stickiness since, the first sounds as one ploughs the feet through it are, well, whuffing. (There's an early, pre-insanity Cerebus where the snow sound effect is "Wuffa-wuffa-wuffa..." it's pretty close, actually.)
But the most common sound I can describe snow makign as you walk through it is a kind of faint groaning squeak, as the foot compresses it. Fuller groans and moans when cars drive over and crush it from loose-packed stuff several inches high to a compact mass about a half-inch deep.
Fluffy, flaky snow is usually sticky and wet, and starts to feel heavy against the boots very soon. It's very very rare to have a snowfall of such kind where the snow comes down in actual neat flakes. Usually, the flakes catch one another and cling on the way down, eaching us in less aesthetic patterns. Snow under really cold conditions is not gentle flakes but little particles more ice than snow-crystal, but far too teeny and painless to count as hail. Deep cold is DRY. There's only a narrow space between the two where the snow may flake but not clump.
It's only when the weather is on the border near melting or just below freezing that you can really make snowballs, though I've seen kids improvise with force-compacted snow, as you get in the snow-plow piles (The danger of that, as some kids have found, is the bits of real ice or of dirt or rocks.)
Tight compacted snow isn't too bad footing, although, becuase it's usually compacted by various sizes of feet, it's not usually even. It can be a bit slick when it's planed perfectly smooth by a plow, but it's a lot safer than some of the uneven, narrow, stomped-down paths I've seen. However. When the weather gets nice, of course, tight-compacted snow melts just a bit more, and fills in the few spaces left. Sometimes it ends up mostly liquid, with clumps of either snow or ice float, and we have the pleasures of slush. When it refreezes, the word for what it is is no longer snow. It's ice.
Ice can be almost clear and utterly smooth, in which case it is dangerous, as it can look like a slightly wet patch and nothing worse. This is black ice, though it's not really black; it's chameleonic, hiding agaisnt the natural colours beneath.
Usually, on sidewalks, it has unmelted snow or dust bits in it, making for some texture (Ah, gratitude), or a fair bit of dirt and streetness, dulling the colour. Or splits and crackles, which separate the layers and let them go frosty whitish. Ice over the surface of a gutter puddle or a sidewalk that can drain usually ends up lifted a bit above the escaping water's surface, which prevents it from becoming any thicker. This thin bit makes the single most satisfying "crack!" in the universe, when you step on the thin surface and break it back down. (It never sounds as good if it's right over the water, or too thick.)
Where the snow isn't packed down, this kind of weather shift can result in a very fine layer of ice-like snow over real snow, and that's when you get the hollywood crunch sound.
Driven snow, the kind that doesn't really settle when it hits ground, but gets blown in ribbons by the wind until it finally fetches up into drifts (So that what the weatherman sedately calls 6 inches of snow ends up with 15 feet of near-bare driveway but a 2 ½ foot drift in front of the garage door)… driven snow hisses. One a slightly friendlier day, it will merely whisper. But driven snow is a dry and deep cold thing. It's rarely friendly. It likes to make its way up the cuffs of slacks, and under collars. It unites with the wind against the brave walker. And it stings a bit. It may start out as flakes, but any decorative patterns are liable to have been torn apart long since, into still smaller bits, the edges worn off. Snowflakes are delicate. Snow is not. (Nobody believes the shape of the asteroid in Armageddon)
Freezing rain can make the world beautiful, even as it makes it more dangerous; freezing rain translates trees to crystal, soft white lawns turn to satin – but the streets it elaves behind turn accidents into likelihoods. Freezing rain loves to turn straight into the "black" chameleon ice. Frost tracing windows and tree limbs is likewise a beauty-maker -- less pretty, but it doesn't make moving vehicles crash.
Snow isn't white. Pristine snow fresh from the sky may be white, as might rooftops, and the untouched centers of lawns. Unless you're lucky enough to catch it at dawn or dusk, when it may be faintly golden, with purple-blue shadows. Or under sodium lights at night, where it's more strongly peach and a darker blue. Even at mid-day, the snow looks white, but the shadows go violet. Lake or river Ice may go green instead. More likely, in the city, the river ice when thin is green-grey-brown streaked with paler bits, when thick, in a light white-grey-brown.
Packed down sidewalk snow is usually slightly tan, a shade reminiscent of the kinds of sand they call white sand. Street snow gets greyish even before the sanders go through. Then it's all brown, and the stuff sprayed onto the ploughed-up snow on the boulevards is crusted in a sandiness of a darker brown shade than you'd expect. As multiple snows and multiple plowings come by, the plough-drifts get built up, and sometimes broken back down, until one can see the geologic layers of winter in the multiplied lines of packed snow, textured ice, and sand.
Slush water is invariably a shade of brown you don't like to see, especially remembering with what glee you, as a kid, waded through a parking lot turned into a many-iceberged lake, even knowing you had good tall boots. (Why the parking lake was so appealing, I don't know, but all the kids loved to splash through it.)
If the snow got damp but hasn't melted into slush, or ice, but there were autumn leaves decomposing on the sidewalk beneath, you get odd pale yellow, or gold-brown, or pale ruddy patches, the colour sneaking up from beneath instead of being deposited from above. (The yellow hue is distinct from the more famous and less natural yellow snow – which I could also describe, but choose not to)
Snow muffles sounds a bit, though not as much as hoods and ear-muffs. But the combinations tends to mean one feels alone on the street more. Distant traffic sounds far more distant than it is, there are fewer sounds of children in yards, fewer neighbours about, and the muffling halves the number you really hear. Your own steps (Squeaking) sound louder without the distractions. The world feels small, your passage feels solitary. The edges of the hood make it almsot claustrophobic, though you're outside.
Because in the cold, the air can hold less moisture, the skies are cloudy more often, even though the air is so dry everything sparks with static. Clear days are often a sign the day will be even colder; there's nothing in the atmosphere holding in the heat.
But I hardly see *day* in winter. The sun sets before I leave work, or in the course of the walk.
Cloudy nights, then, are the norm. Cloudy nights are too bright to call night. The streetlamps reflect off the mounds of snow, which, even where not white, are generally paler than everything they cover. The reflected light is reflected back again by the sky, and bounces once more off the snow, in nature';s own Egyptian mirror trick, until one can walk down a back lane at midnight, and see colour. But still it's not daylight. It's tricksy light, bright enough to surprise you, dark enough for the unseen things to surprise you.
The country of Eternal Twilight.
Needless to say, I'm walking home from work tonight. (Though I'm not a fan of the awful wet of slush). A demain!
(No, my normal writing isn't like this. I don't linger much on setting when I have a story.)
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no subject
Date: 2005-12-30 03:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-30 07:04 pm (UTC)Universal weather assumptions... what you take as normal is likely something I would find alien. I know that being surrounded by mountains throws me. Moutnaitns and hills are nice for visits, not for home. Not unless I'm at the top of the hill, with the long view and the sight of the horizon. Buildings and trees block your view, yes. The *ground* shouldn't.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-30 07:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-30 06:55 am (UTC)I've seen snow I'd describe as feathery, but no, not when you touch it.
And snow makes sound as it falls, a sound like nothing else, notably mostly for just how quiet everything else is. And you can taste the snow on the air, before it arrives.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-30 06:59 pm (UTC)My favourite countryside thing, thought, was the Fortress of Solitude on Lake Winnipeg one year, but that was ice.
The ice froze around the edges of the lake. The wind picked up, and the waves washed over the ice and built it higher. When it got too thick, it broke off, and sank until only the weird shaped top bits stuck out, before freezing back against the flatter ice. The waves rebuilt it. They also brought in broken pieces of ice that had started for form further out. They built it some more. Once the lake had frozen enough that it was safe to walk, with this one line of absolutely HUGE ice formations, with weird cave-bits udnerneath, and all sorts of hefty mounds and lumps to clamber on. Of course, you always get wave formations, but rarely so big all in one place!
(Last night was on the colder end of Freezing, so the slush and the snow actually were all going "crunch". Just to prove me wrong about the squeaking. I'm actually wishing it would drop just a few degrees and stay there, just outside of the melting weather. Because, dammit, the waterproofing on my boots has died. They're only useful in *colder* weather.)
no subject
Date: 2005-12-30 07:23 pm (UTC)I always think of that as "the styrofoam noise."
no subject
Date: 2005-12-30 09:56 pm (UTC)