Sunday, February 18, 2007
Never fear, the plows are near
Christian Trejbal
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Winter has finally arrived in Southwest Virginia. For a while, it seemed as if fall would just meander into spring, but over the past few weeks, we've seen snow and ice.
One can tell a lot about a community by how it reacts to winter weather.
I grew up on the east side of Cleveland in one of those snow belts you hear about. Clevelanders met winter with grim resignation and occasional joy.
The air would blow across Lake Erie from the west, hit the hills and dump scads of snow. Not 11 feet like they got in New York recently, but storms hit every year that dropped snow measured in feet, not inches
That's just the way it was. We dealt with it. Schools didn't close unless the drifts were so high a student might sink into one over his head.
Well, they didn't officially close.
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My mother would sometimes keep us home when there was a really good snow. It wasn't that she was afraid we couldn't make it to school. After all, we walked; road conditions were a nonfactor. No, our unofficial snow days were a chance to go sledding.
We'd bundle up, fill thermoses with hot chocolate, pile into the car and head for one of the parks. It was tremendous.
With everyone else stuck in class, we'd have the hills to ourselves. Chippy, our border collie, would bark and chase us as we rushed downhill on our sleds and dishes. She would steal the hats off our heads and prance across the powder, screaming children giving chase. Then she'd chew on our boots as we ran back to the top for another go.
During the few years I lived in Minneapolis, the cold rarely got people down. It was a challenge. Minnesotans strode into the subzero highs with determination, refusing to let the Snow Miser knock them down. At the winter festival in St. Paul, the bravest would strip to a swimsuit and jump into a hole cut in frozen Lake Como.
Out West, they confront winter with technology. Sport utility vehicles with four-wheel drive dominate the roads. People carry chains in their trunks and mount studded tires when the first flakes fall.
Then there's Southwest Virginia. People panic. It doesn't take actual snow to shut down the schools. If the weatherman forecasts a couple of inches, that's enough to scare administrators into keeping kids home.
Motorists become overly cautious. Yes, one should be more careful when the roads are icy, but that doesn't mean crawling along when the snow is off to the side of the street.
The other day I even heard the familiar crackling sound of studded tires on pavement. Studded tires. In Southwest Virginia! Talk about overreacting. I shook my head at the paranoid driver.
Studs only improve traction on perfectly smooth sheet ice. Under other conditions, which is most of the time around here, they are at best as good as other tires and often are more dangerous. Meanwhile, they grind up the roads. How could Virginia not outlaw them given the paucity of ice?
At least the infestation of needlessly large SUVs wasting fuel and towering over the roadways is less pervasive here.
Not that Southwest Virginians are immune to the occasional joys of winter. When the snow fell on a recent Sunday night, my neighbors were out sledding down the middle of the street at midnight.
No doubt their frivolity was possible because their larders were full in case all of three inches fell and they could not get out for a week.
It's almost comical to people from places with more-substantive winters.
Granted, Virginians don't get as much practice dealing with the snow, but then they also don't face particularly tough conditions, especially on the roads.
Local public works departments do a great job clearing the streets, better than anywhere else I've lived. There isn't as much snow, but local governments could slack and let the slush form. They don't.
Radford, Christiansburg and Blacksburg deploy dozend of trucks in the face of inclement weather. They plow and spread a mixture of salt and gravel that eats through ice and provides traction.
I've never been a big fan of the gravel, but it gets the job done, albeit at the expense of dinged car paint. At least it's local stone from nearby quarries.
And the next time someone questions the value of rail, remember the salt. It arrives in Norfolk by barge and comes to Southwest Virginia by train, tons and tons of it. The three municipalities go through a couple of thousand tons in an average winter.
If only the people whose tax dollars pay for all that service would recognize how good they have it. There's no need to panic when the forecast calls for a little snow or ice. The roads will be fine. The kids will make it to school. The next ice age is far off.
Trejbal is an editorial writer for The Roanoke Times based in the New River Valley bureau in Christiansburg.
