Snow Days | To Commute or Not To Commute

I rarely venture out in the snow anymore. Driving is already the most dangerous thing we do. “Why tempt fate?” I say, especially when the alternative is staying in your pajamas and enjoying a second cup of tea. Over the past few weeks, many of us have engaged in the slippery calculus of determining when it is appropriate to give ourselves a snow day. We all have our own formulas for figuring this out, though I imagine we ask many of the same questions. How much snow is supposed to fall? How well is the road plowed? Do I really need to be in the office today, and how angry will my boss be if I’m not?

When I was a younger man, I was a diehard commuter. I owned a Chevy Cavalier and the devil-may-care attitude required to drive that matchbox car over icy roads. Regardless of the conditions I would brave the 30-mile trek just to say I made it in to work. Then one day I lost traction at the wrong moment. The road curved left but I kept going straight, right into a tightly packed snow bank at the base of a tree. My car wasn’t badly damaged, but the impact sent me skidding sideways across the oncoming lane. After that, I decided the computer in my home was just as good as the one in my office. Snowy commutes are not a new thing. The photo above was taken sometime around 1900 in Hadley, MA. According to the caption, the woman in the image is “a peddler of small wares.” It gives no hint as to what’s in those packages she’s carrying, but it’s probably safe to assume that if she had had her druthers, she wouldn’t have been lugging anything down that road on such a snowy day. The weather seems so bleak and the farmhouses ahead look so distant that the image conveys a sense of despair. Why would she be working in these conditions? Most likely, she was just doing what she had to do to survive. Fortunately today we have a little more leeway to wave the white flag to Mother Nature. When the storm outside is big enough to be given its own name on the Weather Channel, most of us can choose to telecommute or take a personal day. But some of us choose not to. Some, for better or worse, choose not to let the weather deter them and plow ahead with their daily routine. So how about it readers, which are you? Do you drive bravely into the mouth of the storm or are you happy to spend a day in your robe and slippers? How bad does a storm have to be before you say uncle and let yourself be snowed in?