Trenches

You may have heard it on the news: the entire US East coast lies idle due to a snow storm described with any list of superlatives you could think of. The reason it is the East coast and not the entire north-eastern part of the US (up to as far inland as Iowa - and since a few days back also as far south as Texas), is simply because anything that happens in the US happens in Washington, New York or California: the world could care less about West Virginia. But that doesn't mean we didn't have a whole heap of snow:

That was home after the first night of snow. This is what the arboretum looked like:

The trail you see pulled through the snow was - at that point - mainly drawn by the intelligent people who had invested in cross-country skis (a must-have down here, so I discovered). As you go further along the trail, though, you'll find many trees of all shapes and sizes fallen onto the track - aiding the foot of snow in making the generally hospitable trail an inaccessible way to get anywhere, regardless of your means of transportation.

Alternative ways of getting places are not easily found, though. Car drivers first have to dig their car out of the snow and even if that works, they then have to hope their road has been plowed - because the West Virginian way of dealing with snow seems to be to close all the schools, tell people to stock up on food and hope everyone stays indoors until it all melts away.

On those roads that do get plowed, pedestrains find themselves in awkward situations. Regardless of whether there was a sidewalk before the snow or not, after a snow plow comes through, the road is separated in two parts: one recently plowed, relatively clean (if still slippery!), car-wide section on which the cars drive, and a second part on which all the snow is heaped. The last time I stood in snow up to my knees, was when I was 12. Needless to say my knees were a bit closer to the ground back then.


So pedestrians (I'm as surprised as you to find out they do exist, but in the freshly deposited snow, I finally found evidence of kindred spirits who in defiance of modern society use a mode of transportation older than humans themselves) have no choice to resort to organically building their own transportation network. On empty lots, along trails that are long snowed under, on the sides of busy roads on top of the yard of deposited snow and ice, they build their trenches in the ongoing war on winter, braving the scorn of a car-mad society that all too happily wishes to forget that parts of the stone age did make it this far.