Children of the Snow

What do San Juan, Puerto Rico and the Apostle Islands have in common under the first snow of the season? More than you might expect.

There is a kind of hush that descends on the world just before the winter’s first snow: the earth, holding its breath. Not autumn anymore but not yet winter either, the world seems to teeter on the edge between seasons. And then the first flake parachutes out of the gray-white sky, spinning, sparkling, to touch the autumn’s last leaf, or the sleeve of a child’s jacket, with a tiny “tic” and the world starts spinning again.

It is snowing.

There is a magic to the season’s first snowfall. People stop what they are doing, look up from the computer screen or out the window, turn their face to the sky if they happen to be outside and let the first flakes fall on their tongue.

Yes, the feeling will fade. Soon enough there will be cars stuck in the ditches, sidewalks to shovel, slush seeping over the tops of your boots. But in the moment of those first few snowflakes at least, we are all children again, children of the snow, tied together by snowflakes, mesmerized, living in a snow globe, arms outstretched and spinning beneath the falling snow like dancers, tongues out, laughing, connected, if only for a moment, by a world suddenly filled with magic.

Over the course of geologic history, it is estimated that enough snow has fallen on earth to cover the entire planet in drifts topping 50 feet. In Bayfield, that is doled out in an annual snowfall averaging 99 inches, less than half of what Hurley, Wisconsin receives, the snowiest place in the state with an average of over 200 inches a year.

A single snowstorm can consist of a trillion snowflakes and yet the individual and delicate beauty of a single snowflake has long fascinated us. No one more than Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley, a farmer from Jericho, Vermont. On January 15, 1885 Bentley became the first known person to successfully photograph a single snowflake. He would go on to create more than 5,000 snowflake photographs, cataloging their patterns in his book Snow Crystals, patterns still used today in everything from sweater designs to Christmas cards. This cold art was Bentley’s life’s quest, a task taken so seriously that he once excused himself in the middle of presenting a lecture on his work because he glanced out the window and noticed that it was snowing.

(photos courtesy of the Wilson Bentley Collection)

Despite their fragility (Wilson Bentley was known to rage with anger when the warmth of his own breath would melt a snowflake before it could be photographed) snow has and continues to play a role in carving landscapes like the Apostle Islands. The basin of Lake Superior itself was scooped out by glacial ice that began as snow and was chiseled by the immense weight of thousands of years of accumulation.

Snowflakes, even though they are 80% air, are the chisels of the artistry of the sea caves. Water, often beginning as snowflakes, seeps into tiny cracks in the sandstone cliffs, expands in a cycle of freezing and thawing, prying apart the thin layers of rock, widening the crack each time until a cave is born. And then, without so much as a pause to admire its work, slowly begins tearing it down again, the constant chisel of the never-ending artist.

But perhaps nothing that snow creates is more beautiful than the joy that comes with that first snow. Since snow falls on nearly 50 percent of North America each year — even the southern tip of Florida has seen a few flakes — the joy of that first snow is a feeling that most of us know well. But not everyone.

That is why, standing beneath those first snowflakes of the year, I often think of Felisa Rincon de Gautier and the incredible story that connects her with the magic of snow falling anywhere in the world, including the Apostle Islands.

(photo courtesy of the Felisa Rincon de Gautier Museum)

As the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, (the first woman elected mayor in a capital city in all of the Americas), Gautier had many worthwhile accomplishments to cement her legacy. However, she will forever be known as the woman who brought the gift of snow to the children of Puerto Rico.

In 1952, this persuasive mayor convinced Eddie Rickenbacker, owner of Eastern Airlines, to ship two tons of snow gathered at the Belknap Ski Area near Laconia, N.H. in the cold belly of a refrigerated plane and land at an air field in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Then the precious white treasure, something most people in this part of the world knew only through photographs, movies, and stories, was paraded through the streets, the parade route jammed with cheering onlookers, to a stadium packed with another 30,000 people.

At first, the stadium was almost hushed in astonishment, much like many of us are in the face of the first snowfall of the season.

It was the mayor herself who broke the tension by throwing the first snowball. According to one eyewitness, “pandemonium reigned as the delighted mob rubbed the snow into each other’s faces and scattered the last white flakes into the air.”

“It was,” another eyewitness, now 97 years old, remembers, “the most successful event you can imagine. They grabbed the snow, threw it. There were children, but also adults. Everyone was happy.”

Anyone who has found themselves under the season’s first snowflakes can understand that happiness, at least a little. Whether in the heat of a Puerto Rico stadium or on the shores of the Apostle Islands, in the hushed moments when the first flakes of winter drift out of the sky, we all become children again in our hearts.

— Jeff Rennicke

I hope these essays bring you a little joy, like the first snowflakes of winter. If they do, and you are not already a paid subscriber, please consider clicking below. Afterall, even snow shovels are not free.