Having entered only our second full week of school, the one thing this semester has not been short of is snow days. With more snow already predicted for the coming week, this is proving to be the snowiest winter in a long time, and, according to CBS, January was the month with the greatest amount of snow in about over a century of record keeping. If the groundhog doesn’t predict six more weeks of winter, I’m going to claim that he is lying. I doubt we have seen the last of the snow, even though I’ve already had enough of it.
For those of us with vehicles on campus, the afternoon after the snowfall last Thursday was a bit of a challenge. Receiving an email to move my car by 3:30 p.m., didn’t seem as big of a problem as it turned out to be. But then I didn’t know what I would be expecting when I walked out to my car. How much snow could there possibly be right? Let’s try 19 inches on top of the snow already there.
Most of you probably discovered the same debacle as I did: a mound of snow where you assumed you had parked your car the day before, with about three feet of snow that had been plowed behind of it, blocking you in. This was going to be all sorts of fun. (Note the sarcasm.) It was time to call in the troops.
Never have I seen roommates, friends, and even strangers work together to get those cars shoveled out. With a shortage of shovels on campus, because let’s face it, who exactly packs a shovel with them when they moved back from break, it was time to be creative. Working together with those few who did have shovels and those handy items around our dorm rooms that now seem useful to shovel out snow (trash cans, crates, ice scrapers, and bare hands), cars were unburied. Every time someone’s car was successfully pushed out of its spot, you could hear the cheers.
It’s little times like these that should make each of us proud to be UNH students, because my own neighbors back at home wouldn’t be willing to help as much as we all helped each other out last Thursday. A big thanks should go out to those who actually came back to help other cars, even after they had moved their own cars. It was impressive.
However, it was slightly annoying to have to get up at 6:00 a.m. to move my car back by 6:30 a.m. into a lot that was only slightly plowed. If the lot was empty for that large amount of time, I would have expected a better job to be done. I don’t know exactly what time the plowing of that lot was started, but having checked in at 7:00 p.m., there wasn’t a plow in the lot and there was still just as much snow.
But with that amount of snow, and the amount of lots needing to be plowed, I do understand the amount of work that went into clearing the roads, parking lots, and walk ways so that the school could open as usual on Friday morning. I do thank everyone who spent their night into early morning outside shoveling the walkways. I saw a lot of people out at 6:00 a.m. working hard.
Hopefully, we will all be more prepared for the upcoming snow storms, after this “trial run.” I however am not looking forward to the time when all of the snow melts at once and the entire campus is mush. Keep those boots prepared.
