Snow Days: NE vs NC

My brother, Donald, sent me a text from Costa Rica this morning: “There’s an old story about a Nebraskan who retires. He puts a snow shovel over his shoulder and walks south ’til someone says, ‘What’s that thing?’ And that is where he lives out the rest of his days.”

I didn’t make it quite as far as Costa Rica, nor am I retired, but I have lived half of my life in the American Southeast. Snowstorms aren’t a regular occurrence in North Carolina, but they do occur with more regularity than hurricanes in Nebraska.

Still, I’ve made it more than twenty years in the South without buying a snow shovel or an ice scraper. My kids don’t have sleds, but we have friends who do. At any given time, it’s anyone’s guess if we all have snow boots that fit. Fortunately, we have plenty of plastic grocery bags, which, paired with thick socks and rubber bands, make for decent winter footwear.

With predictions of the snowpocalypse bearing down on us for the last week, I’ve had more than one friend reach out and ask for advice on preparing for a snowstorm. You’d think after more than two decades of living in Nebraska, where the annual snowfall ranges from 20 to 40 inches, I’d have a pretty good answer for them.

But the truth is, I have no memory of preparing for snowstorms.

Nebraskans are just born ready.

Sure, there are times when the Interstate shuts down, and I’ve experienced sitting in a gas station overnight waiting for the roads to open so I could get back home. Losing power is rarely a concern, because infrastructure is specifically built, tested, and maintained to withstand extreme subzero temperatures and heavy snow. On rare occasions, pipes can freeze, but Nebraskan waterlines are buried below the frost line, and pipes are often located in heated, insulated basements.

This isn’t to say life in the snow is easy in Nebraska. I had horses growing up, and it didn’t matter if it was negative thirty degrees with snowdrifts up to your knees—the horses still needed fed. Mom started dragging me out of my bed before 5 a.m., because it would take another twenty minutes of her yelling and cajoling before I finally made it up the stairs. From there, I’d pull my insulated coveralls right over my pajamas, topped by a heavy winter coat, face covering, stocking cap, boots, and thick work gloves. Then we’d drive out to the barn.

When the road to the barn was impassable, we didn’t call in for a snow day—we hiked. When the snowdrifts made the barn doors impossible to open, we dug them out.

Negative thirty degrees or not, I’d be sweating by the time we got inside.

Ranchers, of course, can’t allow the snow to dictate their work schedule, and the cows certainly don’t take weather conditions into consideration when it’s time to calve. Blizzard or not, animals need care.

Town life doesn’t alter much during a snowstorm. Our mom usually stocked up on two or three weeks of groceries at a time no matter the season, so the only panic buying we did was Saturday mornings when we tried to beat all our neighbors to the garage sales before 7 a.m. Fortunately, those only took place in the summer. Growing up, we kept two upright freezers full of 4-H pork and beef, and Mom butchered chickens for a local farmer in exchange for free meat.

If worse came to worse and we needed to go to the store, we just hopped into our four-wheel-drive vehicles and went to Safeway. You have to get up awfully early to beat the snowplows out on the roads, and plenty of do-gooders drive around town with front-mounted snowplows on their F-150s or zoom around in their Bobcats equipped with snowplow blades.

These are not common sights in the suburbs of Durham, North Carolina.

In Durham, public schools—and even churches—don’t wait for actual precipitation to cancel events. A snowflake in the forecast is enough to keep kids out of school for several days.

I can only remember a handful of snow days growing up in the Midwest, and one had less to do with the snow and more to do with the boiler at East Ward Elementary breaking. That was a happy day for me in fourth grade. Much less so for the maintenance workers, I imagine.

In fact, I remember far more distinctly events that weren’t canceled because of snow, the most significant being my high school junior prom.

My first high school prom took place in April, and I was doubly excited. Mom sewed me an exquisite mermaid-shaped teal dress with layers of iridescent chiffon. There’s no way I’d wear that now, but at the time it was very chic. The other reason I was so excited was that for the first time in my high school career, I had a date to a formal dance. An actual date. With a boy!

Unfortunately, my boyfriend was scheduled to be out of town until right before the prom. He was competing at a speech tournament in Wyoming. But he’d be back in plenty of time to put on his tux and take me out to dinner before the dance.

But then it started to snow. And snow. And that dreaded thing that sometimes happens in the land where there are few trees to stop the snow from drifting happened. They closed the Interstate between Cheyenne and Sidney.

It’s embarrassing to admit how much I cried.

A high school classmate heard the news and took pity on me. She offered to pick me up in her boyfriend’s car so I could third-wheel it with them. Mostly I wanted to stay home and feel sorry for myself, but her kindness truly touched me. It was her first high school prom too, and I’m sure she hadn’t pictured it with a red-eyed girl in the backseat of her date’s car.

I dressed for prom. Mom did my hair. We destroyed the ozone with hairspray. And I wore too much makeup, which, at the time, I thought made me look pretty. When I saw my classmate arrive, I pulled on my heavy-duty snow boots, my warmest coat and gloves, and trudged through the knee-deep drifts to reach the recently plowed street.

I still remember the feel of snow pouring over the top of my snow boots and packing against my nylon-covered legs. The wind blew so much, the helmet of hairspray almost met its match.

This never would have happened in North Carolina. First of all, snow after February? That would be as likely as daisies blooming in a Nebraska winter. Secondly, there’s no way in all of Tar Heel Nation that a school event—even one as big as prom—wouldn’t get canceled with three feet of snow on the ground.

When I first moved to the South, I formed several quick opinions on Southerners, none of them overly flattering in regard to how they handled snow. But I’ve gained some perspective since moving here in 2003.

In fairness to Southerners, the snow is different here. Forget the fun, fluffy stuff that’s good for sledding. North Carolina is more likely to get ice than snow. And since we have significantly more trees than Nebraska has cows, we face far more severe consequences when those tree branches break and fall into power lines.

In 2000, what has been named the “ice storm for the ages” left more than 1.8 million North Carolinians without power—some for more than two weeks. Over an inch of ice accumulated, and more than twenty people died.

Locals who lived through that learned to take storm preparation seriously.

Fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately—time will tell), I lived in Nebraska at that time and still haven’t acquired the art of panic buying. Peer pressure did push me to the store before the weekend weather hit. I avoided the milk and bread aisles (they were empty anyway) and bought a few bags of candy and other items that might make being stuck in our house for several days a little more bearable.

Sleet falls outside my window as I write this. A thin sheet of ice coats the ground. Church has been moved to Zoom this morning, and school is canceled tomorrow.

Here’s hoping I bought enough candy. 

Oh, and that high school prom date who got stuck in Wyoming? He’s downstairs watching TV with our son. Turns out our relationship has weathered a lot more than snowstorms in our almost twenty-five years of marriage.