Life in Northern Towns V

Last week - May 8-14, 2006 - my dad and mom separately commented on actual and possible snowfall in the Upper Peninsula. (My dad had to drive through it; I think my mom escaped any shoveling.) This brought to my mind the Snow Dayest Snow Day of Them All: a May 1 event when I was in elementary school in Ironwood, Michigan. (The year would have been somewhere between 1982 and 1984.)

That morning, the #22 bus from Ironwood township was really fighting a storm that had just blown up. It was very slow going down Vanderhagen Road, and it only got slower when we started traveling over the adjoining gravel roads and passing through long tunnels of trees. Finally, after we picked up the last kids before we turned back toward the main road and a comparative sprint to school, the driver actually stopped the bus to take a call on the walkie-talkie.

He never talked on the walkie-talkie, so we knew it was important. When he hung up, he matter-of-factly announced that they'd just cancelled school. He had to execute a zillion-point turn to get our yellow behemoth turned around in a blizzard, a 1.5-lane gravel road, and someone's short driveway, but before long we were rumbling back down the route, dropping off kids every few miles. When my sister and I got off at the farm on Pump Station Road, we couldn't even see the house, a quarter mile up the driveway.