We have snow on the ground again in Fargo. It seems like it came late this year, but mid-November is a fairly normal time for the first snowstorm of the season, historically. It only seems late because we have gotten early storms the past two or three years – which made our most notorious season seem VERY long. I genuinely enjoy winter – even the frigid parts – for about 3 months. It usually lasts about 4. So the years it begins early can seem unrelenting. In any case, I am now in the snow-on-the-ground frame of mind and thinking winter thoughts.
Drifting snow is fascinating to watch. It is natural ASMR when you have nowhere to be. When the wind blows, snow streams along smooth ground like a flowing liquid – or like smoke in a wind tunnel. When it encounters an object or a bump – or any disturbance that it has to flow around – small eddies are created where snow swirls, looses momentum and gets deposited. For the most part, the deposition is too slow and subtle to observe in real time. But each snowflake that gets deposited effectively makes the object/bump/disturbance slightly larger, which makes more eddies on more scales – which increases the deposition from eddy-currents. So, over time, small objects or bumps lengthen downwind and start to grow taller. And that process generally speeds up as the drift enlarges. However, the force of the wind also erodes piles of snow and the larger a snowdrift gets, the faster it blows away in the wind. Eventually, the drift reaches a point of dynamic equilibrium between these two processes, in which it is growing larger at the same rate it is blowing away. At that point it no longer appears to change size even though snow is being added and removed constantly. As long as snowing and blowing keep up at the same rate and direction, anything done to alter the size of the drift will be undone as the equilibrium is reestablished. And in an upper-Midwest wind, that can happen REALLY fast.
One of the most frightening experiences I had living on the farm was a day I was clearing snow from the driveway during a storm. I had an advisee scheduled to give his dissertation defense the following morning and, between the severity of the storm and the early start time of the meeting, I knew there was no way I would make it to campus on time if I had to clear the entire 1/4-mile driveway before I got on the road. So I was trying to get a head start, hoping if I cleared some of the drifts a day ahead of time I would have a more manageable job, day of.
There was a critical point on the driveway about where the first power pole beyond the immediate yard around the house stood. It was about 300 feet from the house – and it was purely a coincidence that the power pole happened to be there. Given the direction the wind was blowing, that pole was my visual marker of the point where the protection of the shelter belt (the trees surrounding the house and other buildings) ended, so it marked the boundary between ill-advised behavior and recklessness. Beyond that point I could see the full force of the storm in the more violent movements of the blowing snow – and I did not want to venture that far.
The power pole was my goal. I wanted to clear the driveway that far and leave the rest for the next morning.
I had gotten nearly to the pole when I turned around to look behind me to check visibility back to the house. I didn’t want to loose sight of safety. That’s how people get lost in their own yard and die in the wind-blown white out of a blizzard. Okay, that’s a little dramatic. I really only needed to be able to see about 15 feet: the maximum distance from where I sat on the tractor to one edge or the other of the driveway. The roadbed for the driveway was raised 5-10 feet above the surrounding land (this helps water run off when it rains and minimizes snow accumulation by the Bernoulli effect) – and the dropoff at the edge was pretty distinct. If I could see the edge, I could stay on the driveway.
<aside> I had once driven a car, late at night, down a desolate highway in northern Montana, during a near white-out snow storm. The wind wasn’t the problem in that situation so much as the as rate at which snow was falling. Even with only low-beams on, the falling snow was so dense the headlights made it look like we were jumping into hyperspace. It started snowing about 90 miles before the end of a 1000-mile trip. It was almost midnight. And as we drove into the storm, you could see a distinct line on the pavement where the snow started: black asphalt on one side, white snow on the other. Within a few hundred feet, the road was completely covered in snow, so there were no more pavement markings to be seen. No-one else was foolish enough to be out in the storm, so there were no tire tracks to follow and, as the snow got deeper, I increasingly worried that if I slowed down and lost the momentum, I risked not being able to get going again. I was beginning to panic about how I would keep the car on the road until I noticed reflectors on the posts, every 100 feet or so, along both sides of the road. Since there were no other vehicles out in the storm, I just aimed the car directly in the center of each approaching pair of reflectors and we made it home just fine – never having met any other traffic. </aside>
The experience on the snow-covered MT road may have been ill-advised, but it gave me confidence that, as long as I could see to the edges of the driveway, I could do the same thing on the tractor. To get to safety, I just needed to turn it around, so I would be pointing back toward the house, aim for the center of the driveway, and it would take me where I needed to go. It would be fine. Still, I was pushing my luck even being out in the storm and I didn’t need another anecdote about foolishly driving through a whiteout. So I wanted to keep the house in sight.
When I turned around I could still see the house just fine. But I was horrified to see it on the other side of all the drifts I had just cleared. In a matter of minutes, they had already completely blown back in. It was like I hadn’t been there. And they were growing as a watched. Suddenly, I had a real sense of being in a life-threatening situation, seeing that my emergency backup plan of aiming for the center of the driveway would be moot if I couldn’t get back through the drifts. As I maneuvered a 3-point turn to get headed back the way I had come, I calmed myself a bit with the realization that visibility was still good enough, if I did get stuck I could just abandon the tractor and scramble through the snow on foot to get back to the house.
As I careened back up the driveway, almost literally standing on the pedal to squeeze out every bit of the 14 mph the tractor could manage, I was frantically trying to decide whether I should try to get the tractor back into the shop, so it would be ready to use again once the storm had subsided, or if I should just stop when I got as close as possible to the house and make a run for it. If I did the latter, I would have a big job to dig the tractor out of the snow that would surely engulf it if I left it sitting in the driveway. On the other hand, what if I got the tractor into the shop and then couldn’t see to get back to the house?
Then the tractor hit the re-grown snowdrift, bursting through as effortlessly as it had the first time and my fear evaporated. It was only my fear that had escalated. Not the storm. Conditions were no worse than they had been when I had walked from the house to the shop and then driven then tractor down the path I was now retracing. The sense of panic had all been from imagined, exaggerated scenarios.
I let my weight shift from the pedal onto the seat and I drove the tractor the rest of the way to the shop and put it away. As I slowly walked back to the house trying to get all the muscles in my body to stop shaking from the adrenaline, I stopped briefly to look around for other spots I could safely clear yet that day. It would have been pointless of course. Any snow I moved that day would simply be replaced by a new drift – as though I hadn’t done anything at all. So I took a calming breath and headed for the warmth and safety of the farmhouse.
As I demonstrated that snowy February day, unless you have a goal of simply spending time on a tractor, plowing snow in a blizzard is pointless, because the drifts just fill right back in behind you.
I bring all of this up because I was talking with a couple of colleagues recently about how things were going at work. I described it as a game of whack-a-mole, talking about a perpetual sense that every time I focused my attention on getting one urgent thing done, another urgent thing (often several) would crop up and demand attention. Then my colleagues picked up the lament. It is a common experience in higher ed to be pulled in numerous directions right now – feeling nearly pulled apart.
At some point during the conversation, I had one of those “meta” experiences where it felt like I shifted from first-person to third-person player mode and I found myself listening more as someone overlooking the conversation than a participant in it. And as one colleague talked about not being able to get his own work done thanks to the constant stream of new emergencies, I suddenly saw it differently. Suddenly I was back to the seat of the tractor, seeing the drifts filled back in between me and safety and realizing that I had no chance of accomplishing my goal of getting out of the driveway. I must have seemed like I hadn’t been paying attention when I blurted what must have sounded like to most bizarre non sequitur: “academe is like trying to plow snow in a blizzard.” I wrote it down on the margin of the document I had in front of me though, because it was such a visceral realization.
Maybe its just the nature of bureaucracy. Maybe there is an equilibrium level of bullshit to every bureaucratic institution and when you remove some, other bs just fills back in as soon as you turn your back. Or maybe I just need to get better at waiting for shit storms to pass before trying to clear their debris. On my more cynical days, it seems a Sisyphean task. On the more hopeful, I think the breaches in the drifts – even if just momentary – make space for me and other people to get through. And they seem to be accomplishing things that are important. Maybe? I don’t know. More and more I wonder what we are getting through to. Are we closer to or farther from safety? I’m not sure. But, like weather patterns in the Anthropocene, the intensity of the bullshit storms seem to be increasing with each passing year. And I worry about how many drifts filled in while I paused to think about it.
Incidentally, the dissertation defense had to be rescheduled anyway. The notification that campus was closing was waiting in my inbox when I got back in the house and wriggled out of the 5 layers of warm clothing I had been wearing. So I set about the new, urgent task of rescheduling whilst I waited for the snowstorm to abate.
Oh, also, that former student is now a college president.