A Treatise on Snow

I never thought that snow could look like mud until I experienced my first authentic winter here in Korea. The only images of snow in my head were pictures from the 1985 blizzard in San Antonio: fields covered in a soft blanket, my family bundled comfortably up to their noses, and fluffy sheets of white coating everything. I had this romantic, feel-good sentiment towards the stuff; nobody ever takes pictures of when it melts.

The only thing I knew about dealing with snow growing up was it was cold enough that winter for the snow to stay on the ground for three days. Korea has already beaten that record this winter by a long shot. It snowed heavily here in Chungju on Monday, January 4. Five days later, today, January 9, the snow is still around. I’m expecting this batch to stay on the ground until, oh, mid-March, when the mercury might finally reach high enough to allow the frozen rainfall to seep into the ground and continue its usefulness. As of right now, it’s just chilling with the populace.

It’s taken a bit of a different form since it fell on Monday, however. In this last week, it’s looked a lot like humid salt, mud, and even rocks. Even in the wettest climates, rainwater eventually evaporates and the mud dries up. It may leave a rut, but it’s not still slush. None of that is true for snow, if it’s cold enough: It piles onto itself, collecting whatever dirty flotsam is left in or tracked onto the street, leaving a wave of muck that won’t minimize. I saw a man today shoveling what looked like two-inch sheets of white shale, only to discover it was very sad, forgotten street snow.

No-longer-fresh snow gets its abuses from mankind, I think. Instead of playing with it as a novelty or toy, we brush it aside, leave our handprints in it, or pile it into heaps and dirty mounds. I wonder how much abuse the little snowfall from 1985 received before it finally fled the scene. Did it mask its own identity, mimicking the mire and sludge found in ditches? Or did it serenely slip away in the night, its dignity intact, leaving the public to wonder at its silent disappearance? Perhaps it didn’t stick around long enough to feel man’s misuse yet again.