It Is Winter

It is winter.

The joints stiffen as the cold sets in.

The north wind blows ice pellets into your eyes.

You wonder at its brutality and pointlessness.

Then, your mind turns to hockey.

—Red Green

Most of us probably  feel this way this winter. There's been a lot of talk about the excess of snow and the freezing cold. As a friend of mine put it, we've just received "fresh snow to cover the snow that was frozen solid by the subfreezing temperatures." Believe it or not, people feel comfortable when temperatures reach just above zero. From the local coffee shop (actually, it's the only place to get coffee for several miles), this is what the weather looks like:

This is where Santa goes on his vacations.

Believe it or not, I've seen weather worse than this. Actually, I've grown up in weather where everyone would rejoice if there was only this much snow. Because where I grew up, we would get around twenty feet of snow every year.

That's right. Twenty. Feet. Of. Snow. That's over six meters, for those of you who prefer metric (I don't blame you; it's a lot more practical).

First question on your mind is probably "How do you end up getting that much snow?" Well, let me give it to you straight. I grew up in Japan. Granted, winter is not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Japan. Usually, it's cherry blossoms and kimono. Or ninjas and Tom Cruise, if you're a guy. But that's down in southern Japan, where you find dragons and emperors and...unfortunate things like war-torn lands and sumo blubber. I spent most of my growing years in northern Japan, on the island of Hokkaido (see my parents' site here). How far north is Hokkaido? It's about the same latitude as Oregon, Wisconsin, Maine...Quebec City, to you Canadians.
Now I hear you saying "Those places don't get twenty feet of snow!" Well, for Wisconsin and Maine and Quebec City, that's true. But Oregon shares something with Japan that other places don't...mountains. After a little research, I've found that the Cascade Mountains get just as much, if not more, snow than Hokkaido does. And since Japan is mostly mountains, when you go north enough to find a mountain valley for all the snow to collect, it's going to be a winter wonderland.
But hey, snow isn't that bad, is it? I mean, think of what you can do in a winter wonderland...snowball fights, snowmen, snow angels, snow sculptures, ice festivals, hot chocolate, skiing, snowboarding, snowmobiling, sledding, snow forts, running around in new snowfall and spell words for the birds to read...
...Oh, and shoveling.
It's all fun and games, until you need to clean up the mess that's been made. As illustrated in my brother's YouTube video, "Speed Shoveling":

Snow would fall almost every day in our city, meaning that we'd need to shovel every day to keep pace with twenty feet of snow. Often, it would mean shoveling more than once a day, depending on the severity of the weather. For instance, we have a large ceiling-to-floor window in our living room, as seen in the video above. If too much snow builds up against it, the window will crack and snow will pour into our living room. So every once in a while, we have to dig a trench out of the snow right by the window. That way, the snow will go into the trench and save our window from breaking. One long day after digging this trench, we headed inside, took off our winter gear, and got some hot chocolate ready, just in time to watch the snow fall...off our roof, and right into the trench, filling it to the brim.
Painfully, we bundled up and grabbed our shovels again.
Home wasn't the only place where it was an adventure to shovel snow. If you wanted to move snow, you had to do it in epic proportions...like, the type of proportion equivalent to fighting an army of time-traveling trolls with nothing but a plastic spork. And we happened to regularly clear out snow on this proportion. Every Saturday, we would head down to our church and clear what we could. What was in the parking lot went into an underground snow melter which led straight to the sewers. This was basically a heater in the ground covered by a metal trap door. Open up this door, push some buttons, and hot water would spurt out of some pipes to help melt the snow you throw in there. But this wasn't the adventure, not by a long shot. THIS was the battle to win:

Snow pouring off the roof into this tiny space...what more could you ask for?

To the left, you see a metal fence. To the right, you see our church, with a wall of ice frozen onto the side. In the back is (1) my dad (2) all the snow that we just moved. Before this channel was cleared, snow could be built up as high as that ice wall. How did we move it all? One old snow blower...to those of you who don't know, just look it up on Wikipedia. I'm not gonna try describing it. Now, after you've looked it up and compared the auger to the size of the snow, you're gonna wonder how all the snow fit in the snow blower. Simple answer is that it wouldn't...until someone stood on top of that slippery ice wall and knocked apart all that heavy snow. All the while trying not to fall into the snow blower. And considering that the snow blower had about 426 controls labeled in Japanese, it wasn't the easiest thing to run. But it was the only way we could get that giant pile of snow behind the church. Unfortunately, I have no video of this  path being cleared, because words can't do justice to the madness of the job.
Might I mention that we also had to do this on the other side of the building as well?
So, as you go about your day,when it gets so cold that your sneeze will freeze, just be glad you don't have to move twenty feet of snow...unless this happens to be your job. In which case, I have pity on you.