Snow: the scourge of Indiana
By Jonas Shellhammer
The Monday before early semester break, I encountered what is probably my only culture shock since I came to the United States as an international student in 2006.
Since my father is American, and since I went to an American- International high school before attending Earlham College, I’ve encountered few facets of living in the USA that have surprised me in any notable way.
All this changed on Monday, although perhaps it isn’t so much related to living in America as it is to residing here in Indiana.
I was in a car, going to Ohio — Dayton International Airport, to be specific — with a friend. I had checked the weather reports no less than 10 minutes prior to leaving our recently snowed-upon campus, and all sources suggested that nothing but smooth driving lay ahead. A couple cursory glances outside indicated that the roads were in decent shape, and that the amount of snow falling was manageable by even the most thinly stretched road crews.
Of course, 15 minutes into our little road trip, I was proven wrong. Traffic was, shall we say, slightly on the chaotic side, and radio bulletins frequently announced weather advisories, school closings and the like.
I could not for the life of me understand what was going on — I come from Sweden, where people are used to a lot more snow than what was on the ground that day, and where the local government is at least remotely prepared for bad weather. Apparently this is not the case in Indiana or Ohio.
There was a thin layer of slushy snow on I-70, yet I heard radio announcers decry it as a death trap to be avoided at all costs. One person remarked that road crews were doing everything they could to hamper the devastating effect that this supposedly lethal white substance was wreaking on our Midwestern roads, but that there was just far too much snow falling to be humanly dealt with.
For the record, I saw exactly one snowplow on my way to Dayton and back — in the airport parking lot. The radio chatter kept getting progressively worse, and I suddenly found myself wondering if Orson Welles was somehow pulling a War of the Worlds-esque prank from beyond the grave.
Looking back, I’m still puzzled. Since I came to Earlham College, I’ve seen snow fall every winter, as it tends to, and yet there appears to be little to no preparation for such an improbable event on behalf of the local authorities. The notion that snow coming out of the sky is a foreshadowing of the apocalypse is, in my humble opinion, part of Norse mythology — not a reasonable reaction from radio presenters and authorities in a geographical region that regularly experiences such an event.
I was also surprised to learn that there appears to be no rule governing winter tires here in Indiana. In Sweden, it’s against the law to use year-round or summer tires past a certain date, and no sane person would do it anyway.
If nothing else, I figure that instituting such a law here in Indiana (or Ohio) would save people the hassle of not being able to drive (and of crashing their cars) every once in a while when the winter months hit. This, of course, assumes that local governments would like to offload some of the cost of plowing onto the driver, who of course pays for his own tires.
That being said, like I mentioned, I saw one — one — single snowplow during an approximately 83-mile trip on one of the main highways around here, which is beyond me. Not to mention that it only barely qualified as a snowplow; it was more along the lines of a pickup truck with a shovel welded to the grill.
In Sweden, when it snows heavily (which, mind you, is quite different from what I saw last Monday), the government gets its plows out well ahead of time. They’re on standby. They get the snow off the main roads, and then engage in some thoroughly complicated preventative measures, such as putting salt and sand on the recently plowed surfaces.
Why this doesn’t happen here continues to befuddle me. It’s safer for the residents, it makes life easier for them in such a cardependent area as this one, and it stops parents from having to keep their kids home when schools close.
All in all, my trip to Dayton was an interesting and frustrating experience — although it did end up providing me with some decent fodder for an opinion piece, so I suppose not all was lost in the end.
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