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David Nightingale: Our Non-Winter

This winter, 2015-16, has been a no-show for much of the Hudson Valley. At the time of writing, Feb 29, there's no white stuff anywhere in sight. My snow blower, serviced and ready since November, still stands forlorn and unused in the barn, and misguided daffodils have been perking 3 inches above autumn's leaves since the end of January.

I've been waiting in vain for a decent blizzard -- the kind that, when you wake in the morning, greets you with 2 feet high topknots on stumps and log piles, car roof and outdoor table. The kind that has been blowing for hours and has swirled around the house, blocking doors, sliding off the roof, closing off windows.

To be sure, not desirable if you have to get somewhere. If you are ill or there's a medical emergency; if there's  a power outage; or if there's a place it's crucially important you have to be. But, for us in the Hudson Valley, there was only a showing. We seem to have been deprived of our normal rights.

Yet it's been cold enough. In mid-February it plunged to the negative numbers, (-27) Fahrenheit up in Long Lake according to a friend, and my car thermometer read (negative numbers for the first time I'd ever seen). But there've also been ridiculously warm days, in the 40snd50s.

Coastal regions however were certainly clobbered. On the weekend of Jan 22-24 NYC did get that lovely 2 feet. Not so lovely if you were in those 70-car pile-ups, or were one of the 55 people who died on the eastern seaboard from S. Carolina to Virginia, Washington, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York.

Long ago, in the late 1970s, after a burst appendix operation I remember the nonagenarian in the bed opposite me in our hospital ward, telling me of how he remembered, as a small boy, watching horse-drawn carriages crossing the Hudson from Kingston to Rhinecliff. What brought on that winter conversation was that my wife and then small children had struggled through such weather in order to visit.

According to the records, there was a mini-ice-age for the northern hemisphere between the 1500s and 1800s. In Europe, London's river Thames would freeze and there's a 1683 painting by Thomas Wyke showing families enjoying walking around on the river. There were 'Ice Fairs' on the Thames for as many as nine weeks. Many paintings, notably by the Dutch artist HendrickAvercamp, depict people skating on canals and rivers in the Netherlands in the 1600s. In 1776 George Washington led some of his Continental Army troops in miserable circumstances across the frozen Delaware, and then back to Pennsylvania. Apparently, in 1780, it was possible to walk across the ice from Manhattan to Staten Island.

But today, I look down at 4 little stubs on a side table -- my record of skiing in the Catskills this winter. While it has often been cold enough for ski areas to make snow, and the skiing has certainly been fun, there are swaths of bare ground, with some runs closed off. Where is that respectable base of 2, 3 or 4 feet?

Well, I look forward a lot to spring, to the higher sun and decent warmth; but hey, daffodil and tulip shoots in February?

Dr. David Nightingale is Professor Emeritus of Physics at the State University of New York at New Paltz and is the co-author of the text, A Short Course in General Relativity.

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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