On Friday night, I was driving back to my home in Hovland when my phone pinged with a message from my friend Steve. “Hi Michele, would you be willing to write an article about the SNOWMAGEDDON you just lived through?”
I thought back to Wednesday’s snowstorm. Did I miss something? Was it really a ‘snowmageddon’? I was bemused and wondered, “Have I grown so accustomed to getting hammered with snow in Hovland, that 38.6 inches of snow just feels… normal?”
To be fair, when the blizzard warning was predicted, we did run to town for bread and milk (along with half the county, judging by the empty shelves). And I did fill the tub with a reservoir of emergency water the night before the storm, in case the power went out. We dug out the battery-powered lanterns and placed them next to our beds, for the same reason. And we put the cars in the garage and set the shovels on the porch to be ready in the morning.
But none of those tasks are unusual for us to do when a winter storm is on its way. I woke Wednesday morning to the familiar ticking sound of icy snow hitting the window. The wind was strong, but not powerful enough to knock power out on our end of the county. The reservoir of emergency water went unused. The digital clocks, unblinking, still showed the correct time. And mercifully, the coffee maker was plugged in and burbling away despite the swirling storm. Maybe if I’d been unable to make my morning coffee, the blizzard would have felt worse? Around mid-afternoon on Wednesday, our neighbor came with his plow truck, having wisely decided to plow our driveway in two separate shifts. If he hadn’t, he would never have been able to clear all the snow in one go. He got stuck only once, but it was nothing a little sand and a shovel couldn’t handle.
After he left, my husband followed up with the snowblower, clearing pathways to the outbuildings, and my son and I finished shoveling the doorways and steps. At that point in the afternoon, the snow was up to our knees, but behind the garage, next to the service door, it had already pooled to waist-high drifts.
When our neighbor returned the next day, he needed a Bobcat to lift the additional snow high enough to be able to dump it over the piles of snow he’d already created. By the time he was done, our driveway was lined with over half a dozen 6-foot piles of snow, and one gargantuan 10- foot pile next to our garage. Okay. So maybe we did get a lot of snow. And yet, my Hovland neighbors didn’t seem overly fazed by the storm.
While it was a bit of a surprise to hear that the blizzard had closed Hwy 61 from Duluth to the Canadian border on Wednesday, many folks expressed excitement that Hovland might break the all-time statewide single storm snowfall record in Minnesota. (I imagine there was a collective groan of disappointment throughout the neighborhood when that didn’t happen; it would have been nice to have the bragging rights).
Scrolling through my social media, I found many friends already making plans to get out and enjoy the fresh powder as soon as the storm was over. Sled-dog owners, cross-country skiers, parents of young children, all posting their plans of what they were going to do after the last flake fell, and they finally got plowed out.
Were there a few complainers? Sure. Let’s be real, no one likes to shovel snow. And I’m certain that the road closures and unplowed driveways created no shortage of anxiety for some of our residents.
But it should surprise no one that most people who live in Hovland harbor a love for deep forests and even deeper snow.
The same may be true for anyone who chooses to live in Cook County.
So. Snowmaggedon? I’m still bemused.
Where we live, it just feels… normal.
