Memories of the Winter of 1981
Alas, not the kind of VW I drove back in 1981!
As those of us on the East Coast dig out from under the
snows deposited by Storm Nemo, I am reminded of the winter of 1981, when I did
something very stupid. If it’s not the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, it’s in
the top two.
I was a high school social studies teacher in northern
Vermont back then, a job I really loved (except for dealing with parents). But
one day made me consider a career as a banana grower in Belize. To say that big
snowstorms don’t faze Vermonters is akin to saying that police officers kind of
expect that some people will break the law. If you live in that part of the
world and you let snow get you down, you live in a state of constant anxiety
from roughly mid-October to mid-May. I lived ten miles from the Canadian border
and if less than six inches of snow were expected, local radio announcers
forecast “flurries.” Teachers knew it took at least ten inches on the ground
with more falling before schools would be cancelled.
It was a Friday toward the end of a February. It had already
been a “tough” winter–Vermont understatement for the kind of cold and snow that
would drive lesser mortals to the loony bin. Moreover, as any teacher will tell
you, Fridays are not the optimal teaching days. Lots of us did review sessions,
audio-visual presentations, and free-form discussions on Fridays–anything to
distract our charges from the reality that the weekend began at 2:45 pm, not 8
in the morning. There was no reason to expect that this Friday would be
anything unusual–a few flakes were falling, but so what? Except that by the
time the buses starting arriving at around 7:30 the flakes were getting bigger
and they were coming down exceedingly fast. And they kept coming.
By 10 am more than six inches of new snow had fallen and teachers
and students alike were checking out weather updates. “Yup,” one of my
colleagues proclaimed, “The radio says it’s gonna be a big one. Maybe more than
three feet.” A foot of that had already fallen by lunchtime. Surely schools
would be closed and they’d send us all home. Except “they” didn’t! Some faculty
members quickly decided it would be a good idea to sit with the kids at lunch,
something we often did anyhow because–no matter what the Tea Party tells
you–most teachers really like their
kids. But this time it was all about crowd control. Put bluntly, the kids were
bouncing off the walls and we teachers were thinking, “Uh, oh–prime food fight
conditions.” I recall grabbing the arm of one of my students who was about to
launch some spaghetti and saying to him, “Hey man! What are you doing? Your mom works in the cafeteria and she’ll
have to clean up this mess.” A quick, “Sorry Mr. W–wasn’t thinking,” and we
were cool, but it was the longest single afternoon of teaching of my career.
Forget the zombie apocalypse; my students had been transformed into little
anarchists, each just waiting for me to turn my back before lighting the fuse
and tossing a bomb. I did everything I could to distract them–jokes, videos,
impromptu discussions about how local decision-making worked…. I recall that I
actually showed one class a filmstrip (remember those?) hiding in the back of
my desk; it was titled “Your Friends in the Tungsten Industry.” I invited
students to come up with their own snarky commentary (and pretended not to hear
anything NC-17).
The only concession made to the weather was that the
administration allowed teachers to leave the same time as students instead of
staying an hour later to close up shop. By then it was hard to tell how much
snow had fallen, as the winds had picked up–just perfect for my three-mile
commute along the open banks of the Lamoille River and up the steady hill to my
road. I had a VW Rabbit back in those days, more of a snow sled than a
snowplow. It weighed less than a ton even when loaded with four adults. It took
nearly an hour to navigate to the foot of the hill, which I inched up knowing
that if, at any point, I began to spin, I’d have to back down and start again.
I made it, but the day had taken its toll and I was fried. Then came the last
horror! I turned on to my dirt road and beheld a driveway buried under
approximately two feet of virgin white blanket.
It seemed so rational at the time. “I’ve had it!” I thought.
“There is no frigging way I’m shoveling this sucker until morning.” The Greeks
had a word for such defiance of the gods: hubris. Did I heed it? That would be
no! I carefully backed up my car to the end of the road, dropped the
transmission into drive and gunned the engine. I made an abrupt sliding turn
into the driveway, sheering a spray of snow in several directions. The next
thing I knew, I was staring at the sky as if I were Neil Armstrong inside an
Apollo space capsule. My maneuver served only to lift the front end up the VW
straight into the air with about 4 feet of snow resting under the car. I opened
the car door and tumbled down my stupidity-built cascade.
The next step was to call a colleague who knew about cars
and ask him if it was okay to leave the VW aimed at the moon. After he stopped
laughing, he told me that would be a very bad idea as I had probably compacted
snow around the engine block. That needed to be removed he told me, or the hoses
would probably freeze and break, as might the radiator or perhaps even the
engine block itself. By the way, he advised, I had to be careful to shovel the
car level so that it came down evenly and not with a jolt. It was vital that I
level the car and take a broom handle and gently tap away as much snow as I
could from vital working parts. Need I tell you that the moon was high in the
sky by the time I finished? I would add that it was also the moment in which I
also decided that I didn’t want to be an astronaut. But Belize sounded like a
good idea.--Rob Weir
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