Snow sparks memories of county's earlier days

Snow in the suburbs slows down everything.

Cars creep and slide along the roadways, doubling the time needed for every trip. People walk gingerly, trying not to fall. Cats proceed outdoors hesitantly, wondering about the white world before them. Every sound is muffled.

As I pulled into a gas station this week, navigating around the car-high walls of snow at the plowed entrance, an image of snow in early Lake County from the museum's archival collection came into my head.

Horse-drawn sleighs with blanket-bundled passengers document a different kind of human-snow interaction -- the more snow, the better. In cars, snow is a nuisance. Without cars, abundant snow made it easier to get around.

During a low-snow winter before the turn of the 20th century, travel was exceedingly difficult. The winter months generally meant mud and nearly impassable, rutted roadways.

But one thing about snow in the suburbs has not changed: the beauty. English writer Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) wrote a poem about snow, which easily could have been written this year and not 100 years ago.

Snow in the Suburbs

Every branch big with it,

Bent every twig with it,

Every fork like a white web-foot;

Every street and pavement mute:

Some flakes have lost their way, and grope back upward when

Meeting those meandering down they turn and descend again.

The palings are glued together like a wall,

And there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall.

A sparrow enters the tree,

Whereon immediately

A snow-lump thrice his own slight size

Descends on him and showers his head and eye

And overturns him,

And near inurns him,

And lights on a nether twig, when its brush

Starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush.

The steps are a blanch slope,

Up which, with feeble hope,

A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin;

And we take him in.

• Katherine Hamilton-Smith is the director of cultural resources for the Lake County Forest Preserve District. The Lake County Discovery Museum, a department of the forest preserve district, is an award-winning regional history museum on Route 176, west of Fairfield Road, near Wauconda. The museum is open from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 1 to 4:30 p.m. Sunday. For information, call (847) 968-3400.