Lake effect snow occurs when water evaporating from the Great Lakes meets cold air blowing in from the west. Almost as soon as it rises it begins to precipitate into snow, which makes for a peculiar sort of weather. Sometimes it arrives a constant, steady snow, so light it looks horizontal as it blows past, but often it is more variable, with lead colored clouds racing across the sky in thick bands. These bring with them squalls that can be as heavy as the most severe blizzard, then break out into clear blue sky a few moments later, only for the process to repeat.
For me this peculiar weather pattern is the quintessence of winter here in central New York. I still manage to work myself into a lather about big snowstorms, but over the course of a winter the slow layering of lake effect snow often accounts for most of the accumulation.
Winter has arrived early this year, as early as I can recall. We’ve had snow the day after Thanksgiving and an all day storm this past Tuesday. We’ve had a low temperature of -13, and there doesn’t look to be a single day with a high above freezing anytime soon. We’ve had lake effect drop five inches on a day with nothing but flurries in the forecast. We’ve had the world go from the drab senescence of late fall to the brilliant monochrome of a new white sheet, with fields distant and near curiously flattened so that only the diminishing size of their treelines marks the increasing distance.
I was out fetching firewood on the day we had lake effect, and amid the low gray cloud roiling above and the wind-tossed snow eddying down in great swirls flew twenty odd geese. They headed south even as the strong wind pushed them eastwards, so they moved in a slant across the sky. They’d made a loose curve rather than a vee, and as I watched they rearranged themselves to tack up into the wind before turning south once more. First they vanished from sight, and then their chorus of hoarse honking faded.
I wonder what made this small group of geese so late. October saw flock after flock land in the stubble of my neighbor’s wheat field. Each would spend a day or two gleaning fallen grain and pecking at shoots of green, then move on, charting a steady course through the brisk autumn air. Why would these stragglers be more than a month behind?
Geese can cover hundreds of miles in a single day of flight, so the ones I saw most likely arrived in a friendlier climate by the time they paused their migration; if they made it even thirty miles south of here they would have found cold but very little snow. But I suspect a goose has no notion of such things. In the moment it has no choice but to press on regardless of the conditions.
As I look ahead to what promises to be a long, long winter, I find inspiration in the stoic acceptance with which not just geese but deer and hawks and everything else go about dealing with the world as it arrives. The uniquely human capacity for reflection is beautiful, but it should not completely displace this more creaturely way of life.