The big snows, 1937 and 2015

Vernon weather is starting to disappoint me but my friends and neighbors aren’t.  After actively shoveling around the house all Monday and getting help from Taiyo’s family, I spent Tuesday sedentarily worrying about the load of snow on the flat roof  and googling for answers about what to do.  In retrospect, shoveling seemed to have been wonderful, outdoor exercise that accomplished so much.  By late afternoon, I had concluded that I should buy a roof rake, clear off most of the snow on the small sloping roof at the back, get a ladder, climb up on that roof and throw magnesium chloride as far as I could all over the flat roof to encourage melting so that the snow would turn to water and flow down the drain.  Mo and John thought this sounded dangerous and futile.  John suggested I wait and collect from the insurance company if the roof collapsed.  I agreed to the extent that I went skiing with them on Wednesday morning.  The skiing was crap because Silver Star had had much more rain on Tues. than Vernon had and Monday’s wonderful white had wrinkled and hardened.  The skiing was OK where the groomer had been but difficult elsewhere.  That afternoon my troublesome thoughts returned and I went out and bought a snow rake and a bag of calcium magnesium acetate (the closest compound I could find to what was recommended).  Then I couldn’t assemble the rake.  John agreed reluctantly to help me and did.  I phoned Taiyo to ask him to help me do the job, and this morning he arrived at ten to get it done.  He pulled the snow off the sloping roof with the rake, held the ladder as I climbed up and passed me bowls of chemical, which I threw on the flat roof.  There already seemed to be faint runnels tending in the direction of where I think the drain is.  I made pathetic efforts to aim the mitts full of chemical crystals at these to encourage them but all I really accomplished, I think, was an easing of my mental anguish.  I’m no great thrower.  At any rate, I’ve made an effort and I won’t think about it again.  I read this morning in ‘The Morning Star’ that the only time Vernon experienced a dump of snow greater than this one was in 1937.  That relieved me a bit because this house was built in 1934, so it survived the big one early in its life; its beams should be even harder in its old age.

The wrinkled old snow at Silver Star on Wednesday