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By Josh Lanier

 

Almost every night of my fourth grade year I prayed for some sort of small-scale cataclysm that would make it impossible to attend school the next day. 

A power outage might work, or perhaps a water main break. I remember overhearing our janitor telling one of the lunch ladies how our boiler system was on its last leg, so there was that. Before bedtime each evening, I would look out my bedroom window and scan the sky for any sign of an impending storm of Biblical proportions. 

Living in the South, I knew better than to rely on any wintery weather to close down school, as the only snow days I’d ever known were the ones that we never got to use in winter and were instead tacked on later in the spring. 

Christmas break was way too short, and didn’t really satisfy my urge for temporary freedom. I was totally bummed out on my first day back at school after the holiday, and it seemed like Spring Break was a lifetime away. I had almost given up hope, but on the 7th of January that year my prayers were finally answered. 

Charlie Gertz from WYFF-4 was speaking my language on the 6 o’clock news when he forecasted 8 to 10 inches in some areas, but when I went out to check the sky after supper, I could see every star in the galaxy and began to wonder if it was all just another ruse to get school kids’ hopes up. My dad assured me we would have school the next day and that the old codger on TV didn’t know what he was talking about. Despite my dad’s lack of faith in the weatherman, the clouds rolled in late that night and dumped nearly a foot of snow by daylight. By the end of the storm, snow had piled up somewhere around 15 inches. 

The downside of having such a storm was that my dad was in the process of building a log home for our family, and at that time we were living in a 21 foot travel trailer. We were already living in close quarters, and the added difficulty of losing power for over a week made it anything but a vacation. Confined to such a small space with two siblings, my parents, and our little feist dog Prissy, I found myself spending a lot of time outside braving the raw elements. 

Chest-deep snowdrifts were new to me, and I learned by trial-and-error to remember where the ditches used to be before the snow blew across them. I also found out the hard way to stay back from the creekbanks unless I wanted to slip and break through the thin ice and take a cold bath with three layers of clothes on. None of my previous wintertime training had prepared me for this, but after spending those few days battling frostbite, yellow snow, and countless times sliding down “Thrill Hill” on a garbage can lid, I figured I could handle myself in the Artic Circle pretty well. 

One evening I made the trek through the woods and out across the pasture to the highest point in our neighborhood. I could see the snow-covered hump of Packs Mountain and then the face of Glassy beyond. I wondered if the feeling I had at that moment was similar to what Sir Edmund Hillary felt when he first caught a glimpse of Everest. Probably not, but it sure did beat going to school.