And now, every day is a snow day

When you're unemployed, every day is a snow day. So on this Inauguration Day, I can curl up with the TV coverage of events in Washington or with a good book or with a warm computer and watch the snow paint the neighborhood white. My wife had to get to work today, and she persuaded me to drive her. The worst part of the task was cleaning the snow and ice off the car's windows before driving cautiously the couple of miles to her office. I didn't see any accidents, though I did hit some slippery spots. Now I'm back at home to watch the wind-driven snow accumulate.

This is a far cry from the snow days I had known over a 33-year newspaper career. We had a heavy snow a few weeks after I took the new job in Wilson, and after several attempts concluded I could not get my car out of the driveway. So I struck out on foot through  the already deep and still accumulating snow for the office about a mile away. I pretty much had the road to myself and had traveled about a third of the way when some kind soul saw me and offered me a ride in his pickup. I gratefully accepted. We got the paper out and sent people home before conditions got any worse. That's the way most snow days went over the last 29 years. I had some harrowing journeys to the office over the years here, but I always managed to make it, even when a majority of employees couldn't or chose not to try. And we never missed a publication day.

When I was working for a morning paper in Virginia, which normally went to press at midnight, there was a different scenario. I vividly recall a time about 30 years ago when a heavy snowstorm blew in shortly after nightfall. Orders came down to rush the paper to press and go home as early as possible before things got worse. We managed to churn out  the pages and got the paper to press soon after 9 p.m., and I headed home, which would require crossing a bridge over the Dan River. The snow was about a foot deep already. Weighing my options, I decided to take the slightly longer, more heavily traveled route over a high bridge instead of the less-traveled, narrower and lower bridge a couple of miles downstream. After clearing the snow off my compact car, I fell in behind an 18-wheeler with the snow falling so heavily that I could only see the blur of the trailer's tail lights and the path of its wheels in the snow. The trucker led me across the icy bridge and up the steep hill to my turnoff toward home. Without that fortuitous rendezvous with a trucker, I don't know if I could have found the travel lanes on that bridge or kept my little car from skidding off the highway.

For people who have to work on inclement weather days — and there are plenty of professions that require it, including police, firefighters, health-care workers, postal carriers, utility crews and journalists, among others — there's little to admire in the quiet accumulation of snow over lawns and roads.