Rooftops in the Snow, Gustave Caillebotte

HERE is the latest installment in “Tales of Chester,” my husband’s recollections of growing up in the factory town of Chester, Pennsylvania, a place alive in memory but long since gone as he knew it.

My first memory of snow is delightfully ambiguous, textured, deeply embedded. On a Monday morning in January when I was five, the house had a different feel, shut off from all light, blessedly isolated. I opened the back door and saw the yard layered in snow untouched by human feet.

From examining the records, I now know this would have been the first major snowstorm in my lifetime. What a magnificent sight, and the wearisome odors of exhaust, factory smoke and decay were replaced by a scent bracing and stunningly fresh.

Yet, the most-enduring memory isn’t visual or olfactory. It is the profound silence. Chester was a noisy place, and never noisier than on a Monday morning when the workweek sounds prevailed with new vigor after a weekend of rest. Low-flying planes were taking off from and approaching Philadelphia International Airport, nine miles away. We lived a half block from busy commuter train tracks. Our street was a major traffic artery. Punctuating the chronic noises were the factory and fire whistles, school bells and church bells. The snow muted them all, as if the city had been sealed in a vault. The only noise was that of distant-sounding tire chains moving slowly atop the snow pack, urban sleigh bells. This was a morning of unprecedented tranquility. I wanted more.

Chester, Pennsylvania was not in an exceptionally snowy area. It was not a place of avalanches or howling blizzards or St. Bernards rescuing travelers buried up to their necks. And yet from Thanksgiving to late March, after that initial snow, I would come to live in anticipation. If it was in the forecast, I couldn’t sleep until I saw the first randomly falling flakes, those wintry fireflies, flashing against the dim street light through a well-rubbed circle of a dirty bedroom window. Then I couldn’t sleep, period.

Worse, I couldn’t hide this passion from adults; no kid wants adults to have access to his inner thoughts, especially thoughts so clearly childlike. And childlike, they were. For snow was bad, and all adults despised it.

Weeks after that initial experience, the snow that had enchanted me long gone, I spied Charlie Buckley, an elderly friend of my father’s who often ate dinner with us, approaching our house on the brick sidewalk. The air smelled of snow. How I so desperately wanted to see the dirt outlines of the bricks iced with white, and then watch the snow make the walkway vanish! I wanted an all-conquering snow, like the one that entombed our house earlier that winter, to erase the concrete and the blacktop, to blanket the homely roofs, to veil the factory smoke, to redefine the hideous town. I ran to meet him and anxiously sought assurance that it was about to snow. He was disappointingly noncommittal. Mr. Buckley was the essence of dignity. He always wore a starched white shirt and a tie to match his perfect suits. My mother said even his toenails were perfectly cropped. He had too much decency to tell me the truth.

While he waited for dinner, Mr. Buckley read the paper in our living room. He called me over to the chair by the lamp. “It is going to snow,” he announced, not looking up from the paper.

How do you know?

“Look.” With an index finger he pointed to an “s” in the far-left column of the front page, and “n” in the third column, an “o” in the fourth, and “w” in the far-right one. “See,” he said. “S-N-O-W. It’s going to snow.” I was ecstatic. I composed a song. “It’s going to snow … It’s going to snow … you can bet your life it’s going to snow.”

You would have lost that life.

In the 1950s, before the Weather Channel, Accu-Weather, Doppler radar and the chat boards, publicly available information about the weather was sparse. Forecasts were delivered soberly on the local TV stations by anti-children weathermen who professed to hate “that white stuff,” although one of them was having a hard time disguising a rooting interest.

My three older brothers were convinced that TV weathermen, being adults, were militantly anti-snow. They believed our lack of snow was tied to a media conspiracy. “You hear that?” my brother Frank would say. “He said ‘snow,’ and then ‘Oops.’” I could not admit that I missed the reference. On another evening, although I missed it once again, a weatherman must have mentioned snow overtly, because my oldest brother, George, insisted that we all report to the basement immediately to sharpen our rusted sled blades.

Of course, it didn’t snow.

My peers and schoolmates also craved snow, but I did not share their casual, practical and outlaw attitudes toward it. They wanted enough to close the inherently loathsome schools. They wanted enough to ride their brakeless sleds down Crosby Street hill, which emptied into the aforementioned Seventh Street, where years before a cousin had been run over by a car and tragically killed. The “big guys” wanted enough to go “car-hopping.” This was another life-threatening practice in which the participants grabbed onto the bumpers of slow-moving vehicles, squatted and used their galoshes for street skis. They wanted at least enough to make snowballs to hurl at the buses and the unfortunate men who inhabited the Rescue Mission. I never saw anyone in the neighborhood attempt anything as wholesome as building a snowman. I was with them on the school issue, but I was wary of brake-less sledding; too wise, if not too chicken to hop cars, and I couldn’t make a snowball, let alone a snowman.

For me it wasn’t about sledding, car-hopping, snowball-hurling or the snowman. It was about the snow itself. I wanted to have it, to luxuriate in it, to roam around the dingy city admiring its power to transform.

Snow had an overwhelming attraction. The desire for it was and remains a puzzling compulsion that I never have outgrown. I have finally come to understand the profound source of its spell. In retrospect, I now understand that the hints were dropped conspicuously on the night of Feb. 15, 1958.

A few weeks before, I had seen “The Eddy Duchin Story” at the State Theater on Seventh Street, the busiest and thus the most snow-resistant street in the city. I was consumed by one scene in particular. On the screen, it was Christmas Eve. Duchin, played by Tyrone Power, is sitting at a piano in his living room among the decorations, in sight of an aluminum Christmas tree. “Merry Christ … mas,” he sobs into the sleeve covering the keyboard.

This was a moment carefully orchestrated to be overpoweringly sad. I was aware of that, and aware that I was supposed to be crying. I wasn’t. I wasn’t concerned that his wife had died having just given birth to their son. I was paying scant attention to Eddy, barely taking in his heaving shoulders. I was hypnotized by the view out the window of his Manhattan apartment — and jealous of him. It was snowing, fat flakes. They were sticking. It was Christmas. What could be more perfect? Why would he be crying? I sensed something was terribly wrong. With my life, not Eddy’s. I must be living in the only place on earth where it didn’t snow on Christmas, and where fat flakes never would stick.

The miracle was yet to occur.

At nightfall, the alley that led from our backyard to Crosby Street was a forbidding corridor of stone and dirt, illuminated dimly by the haunting sickly glow of a street lamp. The mismatched fences that defined this passageway were barely visible, and the darkness incited the indefatigably angry dogs. They so resented any life form passing their yard that the vibrations of their desperate barking would shake the wooden fence boards. Through the seams in the planks, the dull light would catch flashes of their yellowed, daggered teeth. Outside the Doyles’ yard, near the end of the alley, the night filled the cavernous rat-hole with a new dimension of terror.

I was sentenced to walk this gauntlet two, three or four times a night. The alley was the passageway to everything that mattered in our lives: The junk yard, the store, school, church, our peers. Nightfall did nothing to diminish its importance.

How different was this tedious passageway on the night of Feb. 15, 1958. I stood in the presence of the knotty utility pole that was the nerve center of the neighborhood. Its metal arm was the lamplighter of the alleyway, the bearer of the sickly light. The pole, studded with footholds for the lineman, was crossed with the wires that sustained the steam-irons and the flickering TV and the radios with glowing tubes that delivered those pallid and colorless weather forecasts to the living rooms and kitchens.

I watched the fine, dense snow falling obliquely across the pole wires and the metal shield guarding the light fixture. Atop the already thickly layered snow on the ground, eddies of white powder were driven toward Crosby Street by the powerful northeast wind. The dogs were silent, invisible, somewhere inside their dingy houses lying on cold linoleum floors. If they heard the snow-muffled footfalls, their voices were muted by the disbelief that anyone would be out on such a night. In the presence of that light, the one I had stared at so often on so many nights from a bedroom window, blowing on the dirty pane and rubbing it hard, looking for any evidence of stray flakes, I experienced a higher form of light — thrilling, hypnotic, exhilarating.

I had been watching the progress of the snow for six hours – and how it had progressed. In the morning, I had been aware only that some snowstorm was expected. I already was familiar with crushing snow disappointment, and the two big storms I could recall were utter surprises. I had never experienced a major snowfall that had been foreseen.

I was slow to accept that this would be the one. When it started, it wasn’t sticking to the red roof of the poor insulated apartment house across the street or on the bricks or the blacktop or the concrete sidewalk in front of the Lincoln and Mercury dealership. Once again those winter-resistant forces were repelling the snow. I knew enough of weather to surmise that the temperature must have been near freezing; perhaps it was too warm for a snowstorm, as it so often was.

By early evening, the situation had taken a dramatic turn, and this had become unlike any snowfall in my experience. The air was filled seamlessly with fine flakes, and the temperature was dropping. The red roof had lost its melting power. Snow filled the outlines of the bricks, then buried them, then the concrete, then the streets. The icy northeast wind had strengthened, howling harder than I could recall. By the time I had decided to go outside, at 7 p.m., right as “Sea Hunt” was coming on the TV, I could see that the snow was deepening rapidly. I had buckled my galoshes, buttoned my coat, moved the kitchen chair that held the shed door tenuously against the winter drafts and pulled open the outer door that led to the back yard. The west-facing doorway was shielded from the bitter, stinging wind, but the wind found my cheeks and nose as soon as I planted a boot in the perfect snow atop the concrete steps leading to the yard.

It was not unusual for a nine-year-old to go outside alone in my neighborhood in 1958. Unwitting adult chaperones roamed about, walking to and from the store or the beer garden, their faces glowing with the cold or drink, and rarely would I get to the end of the alley without encountering a cousin or another kid. We did not “play until we glowed,” as the children in James Joyce’s wonderful “Araby.” We merely met. Yet as I entered the alleyway that night, I saw no one, as the snow had entombed everyone and everything inside the houses.

The alley ended at Crosby Street, only a half-block from my house. Marveling at the radical purity of the alley, at the way the snow concealed the very rat-hole, admiring the flakes that so rapidly coated my coat, and watching the wind reshape and fill by boot prints, it took perhaps a half hour to reach the end. By then the snow had deepened further.

Crosby Street, even on summer afternoons, was blackened by shadows. The mammoth Rescue Mission building on the west side of the street barricaded the light from the narrow houses on the east side. By day, this was where we played football and baseball in the shade among the sparse traffic and the parked cars, the balls clunking off the car hoods and roofs. As darkness settled on the street, the ball games yielded to hide ‘n’ seek and the taunting of the unfortunates who had taken shelter at the Mission.

On the night of Feb. 15, 1958, Crosby Street was profoundly white and quiet, the games, the taunts and the shadows buried beneath the snow and hurled away by the wind; the Mission men, invisible. To the right, at the alley’s end, I could see the orange and neon lights were off at Pat’s, the corner sandwich shop at Seventh and Crosby, where we congregated every evening. This, indeed, must be a serious storm. Pat had an endless arsenal of snow-fighting salt and shovels and ice-breakers to attack any storm, and it was not like him to surrender commerce.

I turned toward Sixth Street, and I could discern the dim lights of the junk yard, a half-block away. That’s where I found Bill Morgan, in his rightful domain.

Behind the sagging cyclone gates that imprisoned the forsaken copper pipes, carburetors and refrigerator motors that Bill had purchased from his customers, I saw the fast-falling snow whiten the dirty metal surfaces and expose their forgotten and ingenious architecture. With his cumbersome work gloves, Bill affixed a padlock to the rigid, fat-linked chain he had threaded through openings where the gates joined. It was early for a Saturday, but he was going home.

Bill owned the junk yard, where we would take our wagon-loads of discarded newspapers, magazines, comic books and rags in exchange for nickels and dimes. He pretended to weigh the bounty diligently on his crude scale to arrive at a fair settlement, jotting a penciled figure on a grimy notepad; it wasn’t about the money. Maybe it was about the money for the grown-ups who sold their scrap carburetors and copper piping; not for us, his juvenile customers. Bill would put all the comic books he “bought” and give them to us when we went away every August. While he weighed, we talked, about baseball, about anything. Bill was the only black adult with whom I had a relationship, and on this night the only human being with whom I had any relationship in this transformed, enchanted landscape. The talk tonight was about snow, and it was ever so brief. He didn’t have much time.

Saturdays were his busiest days, and he might hang around until nine, imposing order on the metal scraps or organizing those note papers that bore his random pencil marks, but not tonight. He was closing up, heading home in his black Cadillac to take shelter from the storm. A nine-year-old couldn’t miss the message: I better do the same.

I would be all alone with the storm now, no adults, no kids, only snow. I was cold, and vaguely frightened, savoring a near-perfect moment.

I retraced my now-erased steps, finding only a remnant of a boot depression here and there. As I walked along the narrow passageway from my back yard to the front porch, I admired the endless ingenuity of the snow, how it squeezed through the right roof gaps to cover the narrow brick walkway between our house and the one next door.

If I had to pick the unlikeliest venue for a perfect moment it would be the sad, hideous and relentlessly tedious corridor with the bar-rattled fence boards and the cavernous rat-hole; a close second would be the gates of Bill Morgan’s junkyard. That it could happen in those places is eloquent and persuasive testimony to snow’s power to transform. These are the memories that have survived the bulldozed houses and the evaporated town.

At 8 p.m. I entered our vestibule, red-cheeked, damp and freezing, a now thick and hard-frozen coating of snow covering my pant-legs. I could hear the horns of the “Perry Mason” theme from the living-room TV; it must have been 8 o’clock. I shook off my coat and let the warmth of the house melt the snow on my pants. This had been one of the happiest hours of my life.

By the time I entered the living room that night, the liquid remnants of the snow that had lodged inside my boots saturated my socks. I left a trail of wet sock prints across the green tiles as I approached the prime snow-watching station of the house – an east facing Victorian scale window adjacent to a radiator. I pulled a chair close to the radiator and raised the Venetian blind. I positioned the chair for the perfect sight-line, in which the porch post blocked the glare of the street lamp, giving me an unobstructed view of the falling snow. On the warm, rounded metal of the radiator I placed the soggy sock bottoms that covered my soaked soles. From the television on the other side of the room, “Perry Mason” yielded to “Have Gun Will Travel,” and then to “Gunsmoke” – the shows that appeared on our TV screens every Saturday night with their un-remembered stories. Someone finally turned off the TV; I don’t recall who else was in the room.

Outside something had changed. On the east-facing window I could feel the icy wind that was agitating the thickly falling snow. The storm had crossed a barrier; it was no longer recreational snow. No cars dared test the thickening white barricade on our normally busy street. No one walked past the window.

All was silent, save for the subtle whistling of the gusts that shouldered against the glass. I had no choice but to stay inside, to admire, in awe of the white fury, to a watch a world forced to accept nature’s terms. Thirteen inches fell that night, but what was most distinctive about that storm was the drifts, so high that many parking meters were covered. Revisiting that night, I know now with the clarity of a child’s intuition the No. 1 reason that snow is such an obsession for so many of us.

It is interesting to me today how much snow panic has increased in my lifetime. The shelves for milk and bread are virtually stripped before a minor storm. The common explanation for this phenomenon is that people are panicked about being caught at home with no supplies. Fear of isolation in the end would be a prosaic explanation. But I believe something else is at work in this rush to the stores for provisions. I think back to the night of Feb. 15, 1958. Under the spell of snow, the alley achieved a new perfection, where swirls and waves of powder danced and exalted atop luxurious layers of white. For one night, we could start over. It was an overpowering sense of renewal. In place of what I had known was the pure, white ideal of an unbroken landscape of snow.

It isn’t fear of isolation that drives people to the stores before a storm. Quite the contrary. I believe that many of us do not fear isolation in the least; isolation is precisely what we crave. It is an almost universal desire among snow-lovers. Those Great Isolators are rare, and the very remoteness of the possibility serves only to intensify the yearning, elevating the prospect of isolation to the level of the great white hope. With an indistinguishable pilot light, it is a hope readily rekindled by a rumor of snow, or a computer-model run that promises the storm of the century, or the mere sight of flakes.

More than in panic, we rush out to the supermarket in hope; hope that we will have no choice but to sit inside and enjoy the fruits of our preparations. When the snow is deep and raging and incited by blizzard winds, that well-being approaches an ultimate level. Suddenly, we have no choice but to admire the snow and luxuriate in the limitations it imposes, wonderfully unburdened of free will.

The transcendent sensation is heightened to an immeasurable degree by the inescapable reality that what we are watching is, in the end, incandescent. Life endures, snow melts, but for a magical interlude we can believe that the snow has conquered all those forbidding alleys.

All the while, as we watch, at some deep level we know that the “simplicity” of the snow is deceptive; that the simplicity we see in the falling whiteness is truly an illusion, artfully dispelled by an aftermath of ubiquitous whiteness, wind-shaped into forms that no human hands could replicate. The flakes themselves are miracles of design, intricate beyond our comprehension, reminders of the magical aspect of our own being and our place in nature. They are God’s DNA.

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