A Prism of More Than Frozen Water
A Prism of More Than Frozen Water

By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 6, 2007

How come snow never is what it is? It's always something else: magic, hassle, politics. The first snow of the year, especially, refuses to just lie there.

Early in the morning, everybody rushes to the window. "It's coming down strong!" says Iris, 3, who has nothing in her conscious memory with which to compare it. "It's everywhere."

She spies the Weber grill, a symmetrical black dome with a white pile in the middle on top, which, to any adult with the standard appreciation for doom that comes with age, resembles a black widow spider.

"The grill looks like a ladybug!" Iris says.

The first snow can turn a black-and-white landscape under an ashen sky into Technicolor. Metaphorically speaking.

Later, a class of preschoolers and their teachers hold mittened hands two-by-two and step down the sidewalk with snowflakes in their eyelashes, like fairy wings.

The adults at the window, what are they thinking? They remember the snows of yesteryear, a memory that stirs just once every year, and then -- blink! -- they're thinking about black ice.

So much nostalgia and meaning invested in what is, after all, nothing more than water crystallized, hexagonally, around bits of dust. Too much dread, too. Is there any other substance less metaphorically stable? Red wine, perhaps, or a split atom.

Snow begins as paranoid prophecy in Washington, ripe for self-fulfillment, beyond parody. Snow tracks on the highway in Prince William! Snow beginning to stick in Rockville!

At the Long Branch Community Center in Silver Spring, the county's two mobile medical vans arrive a little bit late to see patients. They were delayed, stuck in all the Beltway traffic, which is stuck behind he/she up there who did something stupid. Why?

We know why. It's the first snowfall, and other people need to get a grip. Snow is a test of competence, of carrying on, and many falter while the Minnesotans and Mainers among us harrumph. (Was campaigning halted these past few days in New Hampshire and Iowa? No, it was not.)

But sometimes, snow pushes people to achieve! Flotillas of buses from all the area's public schools set forth bravely. Even in Montgomery County!

Which is why snow is also politics. A poor showing can cost the job of a public works director, undermine a superintendent, hurt a mayor's reelection chances. As a consequence, for the authorities, snow becomes a kind of competition. The first snow is a chance at regional bragging rights, the real deal after all those snow-plow regattas around orange cones in summer. The District crows on the radio about spiking the snowmelt marinade with beet juice.

Snow is also Wite-Out, correcting flaws in the landscape and the look of the city. A little bit of snow on sills and sidewalks is all the street wreaths and holiday windows in town need to look a little less contrived. Snow is a fresh reason to buy presents.

Snow hides litter, trims the new roofline of the Georgetown library, banishing the memory of the catastrophic fire. Those red-and-white snow-emergency route signs that taunt us in August stand straight with purpose.

Yet snow also is a pitiless highlighter, exposing the incongruous, the ironic, the problematic. Is there anything more jarring than snow on bamboo thickets? Those yellow pansies and pink begonias still alive in sidewalk gardens are drifted in white: It is past time for them to die. The first snow scolds tardy municipal leaf collectors, for now those remaining piles of leaves in the gutter look like badly frosted gingerbread cookies.

Ask those who have never experienced snow before to describe it, and they reach for metaphors, similes. "It's like cotton, it's like frozen cotton," says Lester Martinez, 27, who arrived a few months ago from Honduras.

"It's like sand," says Francois Kemgang, 40, who arrived from Cameroon a month ago. "But it's strong, and sand is not strong. It's something that is falling like rain, but it is not like water. . . . It makes the place become white and covers all the place."

Kemgang says the first picture he will take in this country will be of the snow.

The snow falls on all, and the snow falls for all. Some people want to jog among the frosted trees in Rock Creek Park. They inhale gulps of snowflake-laden air, like cold fairy dust. When they look up, the flakes dust their faces. The flakes are big, seeming to materialize out of nothing, shreds of ashen sky descending. When they fall into the creek, they vanish -- a million kisses lightly rippling the water.

Under the sun, later today, the season's first snow will be memory.