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Who’s ready for some Southern snow?

Southern, I say, because around these parts snow is mostly a novelty. You run outside and photograph it quickly before it becomes a puddle. Ask one of the Yankees here to tell you about their snow, and you’ll hear groans. They will tell you about the times they had to get it off their roofs so the house wouldn’t flood from ice dams or the endless days and nights of shoveling sidewalks and scraping windshields in order to get to work.

Here, we know many of the “boys” will be out doing donuts in snowy parking lots and grassy fields where their pickups can slide around fluidly, bringing out their inner Tonya Harding. 

Some horseback riders will saddle up and hit the trails, hoping not to wreck while going for an inspirational Facebook-worthy post.

Me? I’ll be working hard to avoid being out on the roads because I know that our legion of drivers who never check their blinker fluid will be out driving around to see how the snow looks. Most actually believe that four-wheel drive, which they have never used, helps you stop on ice when sometimes the only thing that helps you stop on ice is an oak tree or telephone pole. Or, they believe that if they have AWD (all-wheel drive) in their SUV it means they can go anywhere.

Southerners get mocked when it comes to their inability to drive in the snow. In reality, though, lots of people up north don’t know how to drive in the snow either, or they become over-confident and make mistakes. Who hasn’t seen the videos of people slowly sliding in their cars down an icy street with their brakes locked and crashing into other cars whose drivers made the same mistake?

No matter what “impactful” weather the forecasting people give us, we know they quite possibly will be wrong. Two reasons. First, forecasters are people who get paid whether they are right or wrong. Second, we have a huge location factor. So unusual are our local patterns that NASA chose a hay field on the Rutherford-Polk border a few hundred yards from our farm in May 2014 to set up two large satellite dishes to monitor it. Locals explained, to the scientists’ amusement, that we already understood that when storms come over the Blue Ridge Mountains into our isothermal zone they often split or break up, leaving us untouched.

So if we’re lucky with the snow, as we usually are, it will be mostly only on our cell phones by Sunday.

Larry McDermott is a local retired farmer/journalist. Reach him at hardscrabblehollow@gmail.com