Snowed In

I got snowed in last week. I was at our cabin on the Pend Oreille River where it was quiet, and I could do some writing with no interruptions. There was an unfinished poem running around in my head that I just couldn’t quite get a handle on. I don’t know about other people who write, but I tend to get random thoughts that coagulate in my brain until they take on a vague shape. These unfinished ruminations can keep me awake until I write them down, so I retreated to the cabin for a peaceful interlude to clear my mind. I had a lot of things that I thought needed done at home, and I wanted only a day or two to capture my thoughts before going home to attack my to-do list. Alas! It was not to be.

I noticed it snowing lightly when I went to bed the evening before I planned to go home, but the forecast indicated I would have no problem on the roads. I awoke the next morning to find the forecast quite a bit short of the actual accumulation. It was another full day before the snow plow rescued me. By that time, however, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be rescued. It was nice to be forced to do nothing. I guess I could have been aggravated that my to-do list had to wait, but truth be known, the list wasn’t nearly as important as I had thought.

I remember being snowed in when I was a kid. The roads were impassable, so my cousins and I pulled our sleds up to grandma’s house. We dug tunnels where the snow had drifted across the gate. Then we talked my teenage uncle into pulling our sleds with the tractor. With three or four sleds in tow, one behind the other, he would crack the whip and send us all flying. Grandma had infinite patience, “Don’t come crying to me if you kill yourselves.”

One winter a few years ago, my wife and I found ourselves wanting some gulf shrimp and Lone Star beer, thus, we loaded our camper and headed south and east. When we reached Amarillo, Texas, it was still too cold to sleep in the camper, so we rented a motel. The next morning dawned clear and cold with a foot of snow on the ground. We spent two or three hours in the motel coffee shop making friends with other snowbound travelers. The waiter assumed responsibility to ease our boredom and conducted an impromptu sing-a-long. He could do Louis Armstrong as well and anyone I have heard. He made it fun. It was actually the second time we were captured by the weather in Amarillo. The first had been several years prior when we were moving from an east coast Air Base to one in California. It wasn’t snow that time; it was ice, and we were traveling with our two teenage children. We were camped in a KOA with neither cell phones nor internet to occupy their time. The second time was a lot more enjoyable.

A year or so later, we wanted some California walnuts, so we loaded the same camper and headed south. We got all the way to Palm Desert without finding walnuts. With nothing else to do, we toured a date orchard before we headed home. Did you know dates can’t pollinate without help from man? Neither did I. Leaving the date farm, we took highway 99 through Bakersfield all the way to Red Bluff, and finally found walnuts at a roadside stand on the outskirts of town. Anxious to get home, we took the shortcut through Klamath Falls to Bend. Bend has a McMenamins hotel converted from an old

school. It’s a neat place. The restaurant was originally the school cafeteria, the auditorium is now a theater, and classrooms have been divided into guest rooms. They also have an open air hot tub about half the size of an olympic swimming pool. We were in the heated pool when it began to snow. By morning, 14 inches of white had brought everything to a halt. Our reaction was to go back to the pool. Being snowed in sometimes has its advantages. I look forward to next time.

(Frank Watson is a retired Air Force Colonel and a long time resident of Eastern Washington. He has been a free lance columnist for over 18 years.)