Meeting Snowflakes As Individuals

I want it to snow and never stop. I want big, black storm clouds—not those wimpy gray ones—to cover the land from here to the horizon and beyond. I want flakes the size of dinner plates, blizzards that last for weeks, and powder so deep you need spelunking gear if you lose a ski. I’m only satisfied by “storms of the century”—and I’d be even happier with storms of the millennium. Each time I see a snowflake, I want to ask it, “Are you the one? Are you the first to come in the storm without end? Or are you going to disappoint me like all the others and only accumulate to eight inches, or a foot, or a foot and half?” It’s a bit of an obsession, I admit, but I’m just happier when snow is falling. Especially when it’s falling on me.

Our world is filled with what seem like miracles. Butterflies that migrate for a thousand miles and use the sun’s position and time of day to navigate. Prairie dogs that have language. Birds that use tools. Sunsets, mirages, and rainbows. Processes that lift mountains and processes that carve canyons. The green flash. Lightning. Salmon. And yet out of all of these gifts, only one, to me, seems like magic: the snowflake.

Has there ever been such a spectral, fragile beauty, writ again and again, ad infinitum, each one different from the last, sprung into form that can make you gasp with awe? Wildflowers are encoded with DNA, their color, structure, and scent preordained. But a snowflake stems from a physical process, and each takes its own unique path. High above us, speed-dating, a supercooled water drop meets a speck, which becomes the nucleus of the inchoate flake. It could be a pollen grain, a soot particle, or, poetically, a single iota of the hundred metric tons of stardust that fall on earth each day.

From this cold conception, our snowflake begins, but its form depends on a near-endless interaction of elements, from wind to temperature to humidity. Stellar dendrites, the star-shaped flakes that adorn children’s dreams, are created at twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit and again at five degrees. These are among the most common snowflakes, and they are favored by skiers because their arms interlock, allowing more space for air in the snowpack, creating, of course, the powder which we hallow. Stellar dendrites are also aeronauts, their branches outstretched to soar on the wind. In no hurry to leave the sky, they float and flutter and spin, they catch updrafts for the pure joy of it, and when they do at last alight they reach out to their cousins for embrace. Do they wish for a passing skier to kick up a wake and bestow upon the lightest, driest flakes a bit more flight time? There is little doubt.

But snow, for all its beauty, is celebrated mostly for its utility or considered en masse if considered at all. Scientists and planners value the blanketed mountains and high glaciers for being our greatest reservoirs of fresh water. Skiers and snowboarders, students of snowfall though they may be, care deepest about what the snowflake allows: exalted motion. “Virgin snow” gets its praise for renewing the world in unblemished fields of white, Yosemite Valley for the snow that became glaciers that sculpted its granite cathedral walls.

And yet all that begins or began with a single snowflake, probably a quarter-inch or less and weighing just .001 to .003 grams. Perhaps the snowflake is too small and ephemeral for people to grasp other than in the abstract, or on a Christmas card, or for what it engenders. It’s easy to cup a lupine or hold a geode in your hand and be in awe, but tiny snowflakes defy ready apprehension. They land on your sleeve and skitter away on the breeze, or they stick to your windshield and pile up. Either way, the experience is mostly one of “snow” and not of flakes.

So I wonder, how differently would we think of winter if we knew these flakes as individuals? How different would we be if we could discern a ferned dendrite from a radiating dendrite from a commonplace dendrite, or a capped column from a capped bullet? Would we experience the magic and be moved by something beyond words? Would more of us pause to give thanks, not for utility but for pure and fleeting beauty? Would we find ourselves stopping and asking, “Are you the one?” And each time, against all odds, would we expect the answer to be yes? I do believe we would.