COLUMN: Ice on Top of Snow ... Oh My

When a Virginia winter storm starts chasing northerners who've moved here to Florida, welcome to the bad old days.

By Donnie Johnston
COLUMNIST

Photo by mandylin on Unsplash

Well, we wanted snow.

But we never ordered ice.

And the polar vortex is welcome to go back where it came from.

I have a neighbor from Maine who moved south to Virginia to get away from this kind of weather.

Surprise!

We had ample warning with last week’s storm. For once, the forecasters were right. Still, even the best Boy Scouts were not prepared for the sleet and freezing rain that fell onto six inches of snow.

Looking back, we had a similar storm in about 1963. Snow covered with sleet. But that time the freezing rain came just prior to the sleet, whose pellets formed a raspy layer atop the ice.

A friend, who was sledding down a steep hill, got to the end of the snow run and his sled abruptly stopped. Unfortunately, he didn’t and he was thrown over the rough ice pellet top. His hands were protected by gloves, but the sleet ripped his face up pretty bad.

In the winter of 1976-77 we had four inches of snow followed by sleet and ice that created a crust similar to our present storm. I have photos of grown people standing atop the ice with a sled and not breaking through. So, this is not unprecedented. Unusual? Yes. Unprecedented? No.

Still, ice on sleet on snow is a pain in the rear end. When you must use a grubbing hoe or a rototiller to break the ice to get to the snow to shovel, you are tired of winter.

Let’s talk about the cold. The winters of 1917-18, 1976-77 and 1988-89 – in that order - are generally regarded as the three coldest of the 20^th Century. The winters of 1856 and the monster ice and blizzard of 1899 were the coldest of the previous century.

This winter reminds me of 1976-77 as far as cold is concerned. As I said, you could walk atop snow-on-ice for two weeks. Pipes in the then-new Spotsylvania High School froze. Farmers had to break ice for their cattle to drink.

In a more suburban setting, few people understood the plight of the farmer last week. Again, creeks and ponds froze as did spigots for watering troughs. Cattle had a hard time breaking through the ice or even standing on it. And cows eat a tremendous amount of hay in this cold.

Wild animals. The snow and ice covered vegetation so birds could not get to seeds. Nor could deer get to grass. In fact, deer could not stand up in many cases, and one social media video showed a doe losing her footing and sliding down a big hill. About all deer had to eat were twigs and buds from saplings.

Foxes and coyotes could not get to mice or any other prey. If you were in a hole, you stayed there. You couldn’t break through the ice. And no wild animals could get to water or even eat snow for moisture. It has been a tough time for wildlife.

In the old days, this would have been the time to go out cutting ice for the icehouse. Some farms had small bonds just for that purpose. Kept belowground and insulated with straw, you had ice sometimes until the following August. But you didn’t cut it into small chunks and put it in your drink. Pond ice in a drink? It was just for keep things in containers cool,

No school for a week! Teachers loved it more than kids. Parents about went nuts, as did the kids after about three days.

Being snowed in gave you a chance to catch up on your reading or the TV movies you may have taped. But by Thursday, even a trip to Walmart was an outing to look forward to.

I cooked a big pot of soup Sunday morning and ate on it for two days. By Thursday I was dying for anything cooked anywhere except my kitchen.

Yep, we got our snow and ice, too. And it should be around for a while because the temperatures are not forecast to rise above 40 for at least another week.

Road crews? My hat’s off to them. They did a great job getting the main roads open quickly. The side roads? The ice complicated matters there.

If you had a blade, you could make some money pushing driveways. By Tuesday some people had cabin fever so bad they would have mortgaged the house just to get out of the driveway and go anywhere. But then, you’ve had $50,000 worth of snow removal equipment sitting idle for six or seven snowless years, so you really didn’t come out ahead.

Just be thankful we weren’t western Tennessee with the downed trees and loss of electricity. It could have been much worse.

Remember, too, that winter is not over. Some of our biggest snows have occurred in February.

But the days are getting longer, the sun higher in the sky and spring training starts in two weeks.

Oh, yeah. Had a buddy that beat the snow out of town and took his wife and his Bermuda shorts to Florida.

Forty-five degrees one morning in Miami – and with winter hotel rates.

Hey! Who says we don’t have winters like we used to?

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