Snow Days

Posted on February 16, 2004 in California Watch Global Warming Weather

Bill of Prairie Point woke to “an inordinate amount of whiteness shining through the bedroom window”. Yes, it snows in central Texas. That kind of stuff we only see on our mountain tops. But not like we used to.

I’ve often told Lynn that Californians believe that snow is something that you go to visit on holiday weekends. A storm passed though on Friday and dumped a load on our higher peaks. Saturday’s Santa Ana River Canyon was flooded with motorists off to take their children to see the winter wonderland in the San Bernardino Mountains or to go skiiing at Big Bear.

A haze of a grayness not unlike thin melting ice covered the mountains until we punched through Riverside and found ourselves on the segment of Interstate 15-E that dives into the San Bernardino Valley at a place where, not so long ago, cows and sheep grazed; concrete lots cluttered with RVs and small factories now keep the grass more clipped than the cattle ever could. I sighed as I always sigh when I pass the spot and turned my eyes towards the mountains. Plenty of white erased the gray granite on Mounts San Bernardino and San Gorgonio; I was disappointed when the Rim of the World — a string of mountain communities at the five thousand foot level or better that runs from Crestline east to Running Springs — was as brown as the October fire and late Autumn’s dryness had left it. Keller Peak, which sneaks up to nearly 7,000 feet, also stood craggy naked, a new sorrow to sigh about.

When I grew up in San Bernardino, I could look reliably to the mountains in January and February: snow falls blanched the whole range, sometimes beginning as low as 4000 feet. On my speckled front lawn, I could feel the cold air that hovered over the not so distant ice cream fields pressing down on the warm temperature mass that protected us from hardened pipes and slick places on the sidewalk. It’s been years since I’ve heard of a snow day at Rim of the World High School and nearly as long since frozen precipitation has given those huge wrinkles in the earth’s crust a pale look not of death but of water held in reserve for the needs of the mariposa lillies, the Coulter pines with their humongous widow-maker pine cones, and the sycamores growing along the runoffs and tributaries of the Santa Ana River. The wet comes down as rain now and rushes to sea before anyone can make a snowball, run a slalom down Snow Summit, or vivify a three-balled man out of the banks. The world I knew is gone. Will it ever be back?

“There’s no such thing as global warming” I hear from people who believe in adamantine thirty year cycles, Rush Limbaugh, and the picayune nature of the damage we have wrought with our multitudinous cars, our burgeoning factories, and our chimneys. “This too shall pass” is what the pollution apologists say. I don’t believe them any more that I believe that the grass will overthrow the concrete at what used to be Cooley Ranch and make it a meadow once again. The warmer temperature blobs that used to sit low now climb high and taunt the deniers of global climate change as liars.