Snow fell heavily Saturday night. By Sunday morning, 25 cm (for metric deniers, 10 inches) covered the ground.
I shouldn’t say that snow fell heavily. Snow can’t fall heavily. Each snowflake weighs next to nothing. Snow is, in fact, frozen air. What we call humidity, the invisible water vapour in the air, freezes. And sifts down. Sometimes gently. Sometimes viciously, as tiny needles of ice in a blizzard.
Chemists speak of three states of matter – solid, liquid, and gas. A snowflake is a gas that has turned into a solid without passing through the liquid state. The gas itself has frozen. But it still weighs exactly what it did before it became solid.
Then molecules of frozen gas bond together. In crystals. Which form complex six-pointed patterns. It is often claimed that no two snowflakes are identical. That may or may not be true. More importantly, it’s not provable.
Nevertheless, you could probably spend your entire life examining snowflakes without ever finding two exact duplicates.
And then these infinitely variable patterns of water crystals fall from the sky, the weight of each one almost too small to measure… Yet together they can bring 200-horsepower cars to a standstill, break branches off trees, collapse roofs and warehouses.
If they’re so light, I wonder, why do my muscles hurt so much after shovelling my driveway?
Snowflakes are a lesson in cumulative effects. A single action may have imperceptible impact; an accumulation of individual actions can change history.
Individual protests against the Vietnam war carried little weight; a million protesters in Washington broke an administration.
One black woman refused to give up her seat on a bus; millions of marchers took up her cause and toppled discriminatory laws.
One man died on a cross for daring to live differently; two billion followers today shape the world’s ethics.
If there are miracles in this world, the water that snowflakes are made of must be one of them. The miracle is not that Jesus walked on water. The miracle is the water he walked on.
Water consists of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen — one of the strongest chemical bonds known. No other chemicals can split its components apart. Yet water is utterly unlike its component elements. Hydrogen is highly flammable – remember the Hindenberg? Oxygen ignites anything. Yet water disproves that argument that the whole is the sum of its components. Water is the exact opposite of its components — it extinguishes flames.
Water is paradoxical. We cannot live without it. Sometimes, we cannot live with it. Few things are more destructive than a flood. If ocean levels rise, the most valuable real estate on earth will re-enact Atlantis.
Maybe all miracles are also paradoxes.
Water is the closest thing we have to a universal solvent. We flush it through our industries, our kitchen sinks, our toilets. When epidemics strike, we wash bacteria off our hands.
Yet bacteria originated in water. Without water, life itself would not have been possible. When we search for life in space, we search for evidence of water.
Water may be the ultimate miracle.
I try to remember that as more snowflakes start drifting down out of the sky.
