Lifestyles

Bookworm: Your shovel has been waxed

By Terri Schlichenmeyer
You have got good boots and six bags of animal-safe sidewalk salt, so nobody is gonna slip on any ice. There are fresh spark plugs in the snowblower, logs stored for the fireplace and you are good to go. They say it is going to be a long winter, but with some hot cocoa and “Snow: A Scientific and Cultural Exploration” by Giles Whittell, you will be ready.

As a self-described lover of snow, Giles Whittell recalls the day his mother read “Little House in the Big Woods” to him, because it struck him so: they were living in Nigeria then, and the story seemed like “air conditioning in book form…”

From that tale sprung a fascination with cold, white stuff.

But wait. “White” isn’t really the proper way to describe snow, he says: snow is actually translucent. It is also somewhat of a miracle that it falls at all, since it “requires a special set of circumstances” to be what it is, “as if in defiance of the cosmos.”

Another miracle: more than 300 billion trillion snowflakes fall on this planet every year, drifting down somewhere every day, all day. We should be glad for that; says Whittell, because without snow, there would be no ice caps, glaciers or water stores for drier areas. We complain about having to shovel snow, in other words, but we need it.

We need it for outdoor activities – so much so, that countries without it are happy to make it for skiing and snowboarding. We need it, even though there is a lot we do not know about it. For instance, we do not know how big a snowflake can possibly get. We need it because it can boggle the mind. It is true that no two snowflakes are alike, for three basic reasons. We need snow for the fun, history and challenge.

And so, we live with it – to a point: some 50 million square kilometers of Earth are snow-covered and most of that is uninhabited. We live with it – for now, anyway. Whittell says that by the end of this century, the world’s average snow depth is predicted to be “halved.”

If you are someone who is eager for the first good snow, that is sobering, but author Giles Whittell does not leave you completely discouraged.

Science has hypotheses. Culture has requirements. There is a flake or two of hope inside “Snow.”

In explaining our snowball’s chance, Whittell is seriously scientific but in a more lighthearted way that isn’t intimidating. There is an avalanche of information inside here, and each page invites readers to learn something new and astounding, possibly life-saving, part geeky, part charming, and part eye-opening. Readers in snow country – especially those who grumble over ten gentle flakes – will especially delight in knowing how residents in equatorial climates deal with their lack of the white stuff.

The biggest decision you have now is this: go outside and enjoy the winter, or stay inside by the fire and read “Snow”. Either way, do not let this book slip through your fingers.

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