Snow Days Past

By Jon Methven

My most memorable snow day occurred in the winter of 1980, when I stuck my tongue “Christmas Story” style to a metal guardrail. I was six, an age just old enough to understand the value of a well-earned reprieve from the grind of elementary school. A blizzard struck my hometown of Corning, New York, and we awoke, awed, to the meteorological wonder.

Snow days back then followed a rigid agenda. My brother and I — at age seven, my brother was the foreman of our crew — would need to shovel out at least three of our neighbors’ driveways to afford a trip to Pizza Hut for lunch. That meant we had to keep a close eye on the weather. No cost-effective homeowner would fork over five bucks until the last snowflake fell. If we wanted their business, we had to be fully dressed, with shovels, and ready to move ferociously on the icy doorsteps of would-be customers ahead of the half-dozen other neighborhood crews also heading to Pizza Hut. With time to kill, we grabbed our sleds, plastic toboggans, and hit the mountain, typically along with our competition.

In our town, the mountain was actually a dyke installed after a flood eight years earlier. At age six, that dyke was massive, as big as any Black Diamond run, with a foreboding, metal guardrail at the base. An experienced sled-rider knew, as he or she careened down the glacier, to lay back in the plastic toboggan at the last minute to prevent clunking the metal, a most exciting finish line.

My encounter with the guardrail was not similar in the least to the famous scene in “A Christmas Story,” in which a peer-pressure Triple Dog Dare ends with a licked flagpole and fire engines circling the block. At some point, thirsty, my tongue impetuously found itself attached to the metal. No one dared me. No one was paying attention in the midst of our exuberance. One minute we were sledding, mid-blizzard, snow day bliss. The next was juvenile Armageddon, an idiot’s tongue cemented to an impassable barrier as I screamed at the preposterous situation.

My brother, who would endeavor into a successful career in healthcare, was first to the scene. He took one look at the ghastly scenario and realized our trip to Pizza Hut was cancelled. He lifted a mitten and slammed his fist jackhammer-style between tongue and metal, separating me from the guardrail in three efficient chops.

I don’t remember how I got home. I was told there was a trail of blood from the dyke to my house. The front door was streaked crimson, which my father discovered hours later when he returned from his job. There were no remote offices or Zoom calls back then, just the excitement of arriving home from a long day at work to find the bloody remnants of the strangest snow day.

Despite that setback, I remember snow days fondly, the mounds of white dust, plows clearing roads as we leapt into the endless piles, trees filled with a fresh, invigorating canopy. The taste of a good fistful of snow. The crunch it made beneath a boot. That we never got cold even after the mittens and long underwear were soaked from a snowball fight. A specific icicle that pulled off the eavestrough without breaking. Hot pizza after a solid morning of work. The good run when you barreled down the mountain, losing your wool hat and left boot, terrified and laughing, and you ducked just in time to avoid the guardrail’s savagery.

Jon Methven is a novelist and essayist based in Morningside Heights.

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