The other day, an alert came through on my phone regarding a snow squall. I watched the sky all day and not even a flurry fell. A few days prior, we had been hit by a storm that was greater than the one to three inches they had originally anticipated. The snow squall alert came through again the next day under a clear blue Colorado sky.
I have several news apps on my phone, so I am always getting warnings about a snow storm within 10 miles of my current location. The storms might be in Washington, D.C., St. Johnsbury, Vermont, Buffalo, New York, or right around the corner from me, based on whichever app is sending the warning. However, the snow squall warning was off the local app.
There was a time when I thought about becoming a weatherman as a profession. It is an idea that fell by the wayside, because I found out that weathermen need to know all types of advanced mathematics and that was never my strong suit. I decided I was much better off writing about weather than trying to forecast it. Although, it is the one job on the planet where you can be consistently wrong and still keep your job. A highly paid one at that.
A big winter storm is a complex event that, though more or less vast in scale, is well understood by science. Air masses, having varying temperatures, pressures and moisture, and moving at differing altitudes in different directions at different speeds, collide and commingle, producing clouds, wind and snow.
Considered from the point of view of weather science, then, storms are straightforward phenomena, differing from one another mainly in their effects on human affairs: So many inches of snow mean so many roads closed, flights cancelled, travelers delayed, businesses and schools closed. But in addition to being a meteorological event, a winter storm has another aspect: Because it plays out over time, a storm is more than weather. It is also a narrative - that is, a story.
A story, let us say, is a sequence of actions with a beginning, a middle and an end - and, somehow or other, a point. In considering a snowstorm as a story, the beginning, middle and end are, as comparisons, not far to seek: the point I will get to shortly.
Beginning: "Announced by all the trumpets of the sky/Arrives the snow..." wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in his well-loved poem "The Snow Storm." Emerson composed it in 1835, long before global warming changed our environment and our weather. Things are different today. Our winter storms arrive announced by all the trumpets of CNN, Weather Channel, TV networks and Internet - but they do not use trumpets. They do not need them.
Instead, they use terrifying metaphor and hyperbole worthy of Chicken Little: "Monster Storm Bears Down on the Front Range"..."Colossal Blizzard Races Through New England."...the media bill a big winter storm as a kind of semi-monthly Armageddon. They do so for a reason: It is good for business.
Weather is news and, therefore, weather sells, but only if it is big and bad. This fact is one that the student of weather should always keep in mind, especially in the mountain West. If you want to remain sane in this area over the winter, you will learn to discount the weather headlines by at least 75 percent.
Without benefit of press pageantry, a real winter storm tunes up in a series of notes, chords and scales far quieter than the broadcaster's clamor - but perhaps in its own equally ominous way. The sun, so bright and agreeable earlier in the day, or the week, is suddenly quite gone. Out of a low, mouse-colored sky an idle flake descends, then another. Not even flakes: tiny grains of white. And only a few. You can almost count them. "Nothing to write a poem about here," you think. But wait. You go indoors for some reason and, 10 minutes later, when you look out the window, you cannot see the building across the street. Welcome to the storm.
Middle: Half the day on, the wind picks up and fills the air with snow. The new snow as it falls and the already-fallen snow as it is snatched aloft again are mixed, driven and whirled this way and that by the wind, faster and faster, as if in a mad Scottish reel. My friend's horse stands stoically in her pasture, not even moving, covered in snow, as if carved out of shaggy marble. She waits it out, hoping it will soon end. You are waiting too and the time passes slowly. The thermometer has been stuck at 20 degrees for hours, as though it, too, were waiting, hanging on tight and steady, like the horse at my friend's house.
End: You know you have come to the end of a real story when the design, so to speak, that the beginning has established is complete - as, for example, in Shakespeare, when the wise virgin has married the prince, or (in a different play) every one is lying dead on the stage. The end of a winter storm is signaled differently: the snow changes. The minute, sandy flakes that ushered in the storm are now plump and soft; they drop from the sky like white doves. The sky itself is different: it is lighter. The soup has been strained. Presently, in the Southwest, a patch of blue will appear. Now, if you go outdoors, you will see the aftermath of the storm in the brilliant-white ramparts, towers and cathedrals that the wind has constructed - what Emerson calls in his poem "the frolic architecture of the snow."
"Frolic architecture of the snow" is good, is it not? It suggests that the storm has been having fun; it has been at play. Before you take up your shovel and begin the long job of recovery, pause briefly to do the same thing. Have a little fun. Enjoy the snow, if only as a spectacle. You might as well. For, remember, a story has a beginning, a middle, and end - and a point. And the point of this story is this: The storm wins. You cannot hide from it, outsmart it, make it go away, gain its friendship, or hire somebody to experience it for you. The hero of the storm's narrative is not you. The hero is the storm.
Down on the coast, they understand the tides. They live by the tides - and not only as a practical matter for seagoing folk, but more subtly, as well. Twice a day, the harbors, bays and coves fill and empty, fill and empty. The edge of the continent comes close, then pulls back. Down on the coast, the everyday setting is bracketed by the daily ebb and flow of the sea.
There is also a tide upcountry, in the hills and mountains, but its nature is different. The hill-country tide is not on a day-to-day cycle. To the north and west, far from the shore, the tides project themselves over the seasons; they are an image of the progress of winter, spring, summer, fall. Inland, the flood tide of autumn comes in early September with the peak of growth in woods, fields, waysides and gardens.
The tide ebbs gradually, then more quickly through the weeks of autumn color, which around here means a burst of yellow on the aspens, and past them into November. Sometime in late November, early December, the tide of the year is finally out. The fields of hay are mowed; the cornfields are cut down to stubble; and the plains turn brown. The season's shallows, bars and ledges lie bare, stretched out before the onlooker all the way to winter.
The hill-country tide in the fall does not work its force on the ocean. Its medium is not water, but light. The warm, dusty light of summer and early fall, suffused with the colors of the red and yellow leaves, withdraws from the skies, leaving a deeper, inkier blue, indigo succeeding upon the lighter cerulean of the warmer months. Despite the baby blue skies Colorado is famous for, the clouds gather. Under the new, darker sky, the mountains seem to pull in a little closer, except where a break of sun, illuminating a section of the landscape, emphasizes its scale, its distances.
The ebbing of the light at this season is of a piece with other changes. The tides in the hill country are in the minds and lives of people as much as they are the daylight, in the weather.
At this time. the verge of winter, the flow and flux of the region's inhabitants is at its lowest. Whatever birds were going to head south for the winter have long since left. Among their human neighbors, the summer visitors and the admirers of foliage are gone. The skiers and holiday travelers have yet to arrive. The fall chores of putting away, battening down, covering up, are done - or if they are not, they had better be finished soon. The land lies deserted, unused, a broad tidal flat where those who are still around and so inclined may contemplate this season's subdued but distinctive beauty.
Low tide in the mountains is no more than a moment in the year, but it is not hard to witness, given the right timing. For the past couple of years, I have had a good look at it, thanks to a little trip I have occasion to make every fall. Just as November clicks over to December, I find myself out west, driving along the Front Range along Route 24, one of the great unsung highways of pre-Interstate America. You can pick it up in Pontiac, Michigan and ride it all the way through Colorado. Michigan is a nice place, no doubt, but it is a long way away. I prefer to do my traveling without straying too far from home.
I get on Route 24 in Manitou Springs. I head West through the Ute Pass toward Woodland Park and continue until I reach the cutoff at Lake George toward 11-Mile State Park. It is a matter of 33 miles of mostly two-way highways - once I leave Woodland Park - through some of the most breathtaking scenery on the planet. Within constant view is Pikes Peak, also known as America's Mountain, which is usually on the left and often showing a dusting of snow on the upper slopes at that time of year, having become snow-covered in late October. At that time of year, I share the road with mine workers and tourists heading to one of the numerous casinos in Cripple Creek.
Driving along the road where it splits off toward Cripple Creek, I might be an out-of-season insect, making its lonely way across the deep end of a swimming pool that has been drained for winter. The country, a crowded, bustling vacation land in summer, is pretty well emptied of all life at that time of year, save for the skiers heading for Breckenridge and points West. The towns and villages, the big old hotels and other lodgings, the popular tourist attractions, are untenanted. All along the way, the countryside is plain, stripped - quietly, patiently waiting to receive the coming winter. In Lake George, I turn back East, leaving the tideland, under its lofty purple sky, to itself for another year.
The autumnal tides of light, cloud and shadow that annually visit and revisit the mountains are figurative tides. They are a matter of feelings, of perceptions. Low tide in the mountains cannot be measured, it does not obey the almanac, but it makes a welcome passage in the outdoor year, for those who will attend.
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