Snowflakes

I have been thinking about snowflakes lately. Delicate. Light. Ethereal. Beautiful. Yet, when clumped together, formed into a tight, hard snowball, or pushed into my driveway by a large, orange rasping grader, they are brawny and bullying.

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo suffered from polio, withering one of her legs when she was a child. Because she was limited physically, she often stayed home. She went through many surgeries and would later be further injured in a terrible bus accident when a bus handrail impaled her at the age of 18. Because she was often bedridden, she had to use her imagination. While the other kids would go out and play, a young Frida would go to her bedroom window and breath on it, drawing a door on the condensation so she could escape outside. Her vivid imagination allowed her to become one of the most famous artists of her time. Known for self-portraits, she once said she was often alone and could paint only what she knew.

If I could paint what I know best right now, it would be snowflakes. Mainly because lately, I have been shoveling a lot of snowflakes.

At least one septillion snowflakes fall in the U.S. each year. One septillion is a 1 with 24 zeros. Worldwide, about one quadrillion cubic feet of snowfall somewhere on Earth, and each cubic foot of snow contains approximately a few billion snowflakes which ends up being a lot of snowflakes. Put it another way. About a million billion snowflakes fall every second. That’s what it says on SnowCrystals.com, anyway.

I’m pretty sure Cook County is getting its share of those snowflakes this winter, but if you asked me how many fell, I have to say I stopped counting at 16 and went back to shoveling— and shoveling some more.

Experts say snowflakes aren’t white. Light doesn’t pass through snowflakes as it does through a window; it is reflected off of them. And because light scatters in so many directions, it can’t be absorbed or be reflected consistently, so snowflakes only appear then as white. That said, I’m pretty sure they aren’t colored green or red or yellow, although that would be cool if snowflakes fell in a rainbow of colors. Think how stained the kid’s snow pants would get after playing in the snow all day.

Greenland has the oldest ice in the world. It’s made of snow that fell one-quarter of a million years ago. I’m pretty sure some of that Greenland ice has traveled to Cook County and ended up in my driveway. It seems like my driveway ice has always been there and I’ve slipped on that ice about a quarter of a million times.

Give or take, ten inches of snow equals about one-tenth of an inch of water. So, when ten inches of snow come up over my tennis shoes and make my socks wet, I go inside and ring my socks out. When I get done ringing, I get about one-tenth of an inch of water in the sink. That pretty much proves the scientific snow-to-water ratio as far as I am concerned.

According to the Guinness World Record list, the hugest snowflake ever recorded was 15 inches in diameter and eight inches thick. That freakishly large snowflake was measured in 1887 in Fort Keogh, Montana. Besides being the location where the largest snowflake was ever recorded, Fort Keogh is also famous because it supplied thousands of horses to the Army during World War 1.

It’s a myth that no two snowflakes are identical. In 1988 Nancy Knight found two identical snowflakes while studying snow crystals from a storm in Wisconsin. Knight, a scientist at the National Center for Atmosphere Research in Boulder, Colorado, was examining snow crystals using a microscope.

People like Nancy Knight have also discovered that snowflakes come in 35 different shapes. So I’m pretty sure the next significant scientific breakthrough will come when scientists discover that elusive 36th snowflake shape.

Antarctica has 2.7-million year-old ice. On January 8, 2019, scientists drilled the most bottomless hole ever. It took 63 hours to drill down to 7,060 feet, breaking through the Rutford Ice Stream in West Antarctica. The successful drill was 20 years in the planning for project BEAMISH (Bed Access, Monitoring and Ice Sheet History) and will help predict how the area will respond to Climate change. At least that’s the hope. Or it will forever be known as a really deep hole until it freezes over.

The Russian Church conducts the rite of Great Blessing of the Ancient Waters, also known as “The Great Sanctification of the Water,” on January 19 every year. This epiphany marks the Orthodox Church of the baptism of Jesus Christ into the church. It’s freezing in most places in Russia during January. I can see the ancient priests cutting holes in the lake ice to get water, or melting snow in large iron pots above a crackling fire to come up with the needed water for the sanctification, angels peering through the windows of the churches, their angelic fingers marking the stained glass with the sign of the cross, or dove. Their wings shivering as they work.

It’s a wild ride sometimes. Imagination that is. Dizzying, fraught with fear and complexities, colored by a reality that may or may not be confirmed. Imagination then is like a gently falling snowflake; it’s translucent and light, but when too many fall, it’s a storm of brightness that can bury you.

In physics and astronomy, the three-body problem is finding the motion of three celestial bodies moving under no influence other than their mutual gravitation. I think of that as I watch six sided snowflakes endlessly fall.

Too much shoveling snow can lead to entropy, a lack of order or predictability, a gradual decline into disorder. In simple terms, entropy measures the amount of energy that is unavailable to do work. After a long day of work and shoveling snow, that would be my back.

The Chaicatongo Mixtec language is spoken by roughly 6,000 people in Oaxaca, Mexico, and statistically is considered the strangest spoken language on earth. What sets it apart from all other languages is there is no “yes or no” in their spoken tongue. This is the only spoken language with this trait. This language also doesn’t have a past or perfect tense, and words are repeated to mean different things based on how they are pronounced. For example, Yaa can mean tongue, music, or ashes, based on how the word is pronounced. Yoo means moon. That might be the closest word to snow these people of the rain have.

As I am writing this, it is -2F in Fort Keogh. It’s about that cold here. Today Fort Keogh serves as a USDA-Agricultural Research Service rangeland beef cattle research operated with Montana. I’m not sure if those researchers care about the size of snowflakes; instead, they care about the health of cows whose flatulence help cause global warming, which melts snowflakes. That’s what President Ronald Reagan told us anyway.

It has only snowed twice in Mexico City, where Frida Kahlo was born. Mexico City received snow on March 5, 1940, and on January 12, 1967. Frida died July 13, 1954, in Coyoacan, a borough of Mexico City. I hope she saw the snow of 1940. Or it got cold enough for frost to cover her windows. And I hope she traced a shape with her fingers in the frost. Maybe one of a snowman. Or snowwoman. Frost made with the great sanctification of water, fused by snow a quarter of a million years old, or with snow that fell from the hooves of a thousand horses sent off to war across the ocean. An eternal snowman, or snowwoman, melting into the sunlight of forever, just like the magic of Frida Kahlo. Here once, here today in her pictures, forever in any window a child looks out of and dreams.