BY HARRY WEEKES
Now well into my fifth decade in the Wood River Valley, you think I might be a good source of weather information, a guy people seek out for answers to questions like, “Do you ever remember a winter like this?”
When I am asked to conjure up such memories, I blink in the slow and methodical way of someone interpreting another language. Questions like this make me muse. Starting with, “What do I remember?”
An aside, I am fairly confident the data exist so that someone could easily enough print out an entire record of each winter over the last 50 years. This theoretical person would then be able to fact check every winter, every month, every February, every precipitation event and instead of asking would be able to say, “You know, this is just like the winter of 1986-1987 when we had a below usual amount of snow, but a similar amount of precipitation.”
As for me and my memory, I tend to say things like, “Ummm, I think there was a time when we had grass in February, but that may have been right after I got out of college. In terms of any time before that, the only things I remember are my cat Zanzibar and that my mom used to drag us behind our car on a toboggan. Oh, and there was the time when we could ice skate down all of Gimlet there was so much ice.”
In an effort to be more helpful, to others and myself, I am working on fueling my memory, to provide it with some markers, some clues to apply to future events. Has anything unusual happened this year that might be some kind of Farmers’ Almanac type of event? Something natural that would both help me remember this year and also offer Nostradamus-like predictions in years to come?
Right now, I have come up with two things: the fruit trees and the Northern Lights.
Remember how much fruit we had in the fall? People couldn’t stop mentioning the number of apricots, or how the plums were going off, or that even the smallest apple tree became ridiculously overabundant.
What if this is true? From the trees’ perspective, it makes a certain kind of sense—have as many babies as you possibly can because the winter is going to be mild. This will give the most seeds the best chance of survival. But then, in what way would trees be able to predict the future? And what if they could? Obviously, trees are acutely in tune with the atmosphere and they live for hundreds of years. So… what signal did they get and when did they say, “OK, it’s going to be a light snow year, let’s make some fruit!” And since trees don’t speak, how exactly did they say this?
The other natural event has been celestial. This has been a real Northern Lights-y kind of a winter. (I will return to my Northern Lights experience once I develop the ability to describe something that magical.)
What if these are related? What if we have had a winter like this, and it was in 1996, and it was because that was the year there was some massive coronal mass ejection that released a huge amount of plasma and magnetic energy and the plants picked up on it and somehow knew this made for less snow in our specific part of the Northern Hemisphere so they made more flowers, enticed more insects, and bore more fruit?!
My eyes widen even writing that paragraph. Which is probably evidence for why not many people ask me about winters.
Harry Weekes is the founder and head of school at The Sage School in Hailey. This is his 54th year in the Wood River Valley, where he lives with Hilary and their two mini-Dachshunds. The baby members of their flock have now become adults; Georgia and Simon are fledging in North Carolina, and Penelope has recently changed roosting sites to Connecticut.
