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A Cape Cod Notebook can be heard every Tuesday morning at 8:45am and afternoon at 5:45pm.It's commentary on the unique people, wildlife, and environment of our coastal region.A Cape Cod Notebook commentators include:Robert Finch, a nature writer living in Wellfleet who created, 'A Cape Cod Notebook.' It won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing.

On the One-year Anniversary of "The Blizzard of 2015"

NASA / Stuart Rankin / flickr
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CC BY-NC 2.0
Cape Cod, winter 2015.

It was this Tuesday, exactly a year ago, that the Cape and Islands were hit with what was instantly christened “The Blizzard of 2015” – though at the time we didn’t know that there would be several more Blizzards of 2015 to come. 

Still, it was a memorable storm. A confluence of meteorological events – polar air moving down from Canada, warm moist air moving up the coast, and snow moving east out of the Mid-West – all came together over New England. The result was an enormous, two-day, slow-moving northeaster with winds of 40-50 knots and gusts up to 80, dropping some 20” of snow on the Outer Cape (though I’ve always wondered, how do they measure snowfall when the winds are blowing so strongly?)

Yes, it was a major winter storm, no doubt. And yet, here on the Cape at least, it seemed so benign that it hardly seemed worth recording, except for its benignity. The snow that fell on us was relatively light and easy to shovel. Our house never lost power. Out on the Outer Beach the usual suspects were claimed: there was another ocean breakthrough at Ballston Beach (ho-hum), the stairs at Nauset Light Beach were destroyed again (a nearly annual, and quite expensive occurrence). Yes, Nantucket went dark for about twelve hours (that would have been something to see from the air), and 97% of Provincetown lost power for four hours. But come on, folks, nothing really unusual happened here that we haven’t seen before. For that matter the fact that this storm was ranked as one of the top ten blizzards in Boston since 1935 (and why 1935?) merely reduced my idea of the dimensions of New England snowstorms.

Still, we wanted see it as something extreme. The day after the storm, I drove to Yarmouth for an eye examination. I was surprised to find I was the only patient there. The staff seemed to be sitting around wondering what to do. My ophthalmologist seemed surprised to see me. “You see,” he explained, "we didn’t really expect you. Most of our patients are – older – and, um, they sometimes have trouble getting out of their driveways.”

It made me feel a bit like an explorer, so on the way home I decided to drive up to Fort Hill in Eastham. They had only plowed the road as far as the last house below the hill, so I parked at the Maple Swamp parking lot and walked up the hill to the overlook of Nauset Marsh. It was a stunningly picturesque scene: a steel-gray sky, whitened fields, banks of damp-brown marsh, stark apple trees and shadow-grim cedars, and a thin crumpled line of beach on the horizon. All the outlines were sharp and still, and all the hues intense and yet dampened and saturated with gray. It looked like one of those Andrew Wyeth paintings in which everything – humans and their landscapes, looks mortally fragile.

There was something painfully lovely about the stubble sticking up through the mowed, snow-filled fields around me: blackberry vines, sumac stems, and other bits of dark plant life poking up through the smooth drifted snow, so that I felt that, given a razor large, keen and light enough, I could have shaved the cheeks of the earth.

Robert Finch is a nature writer living in Wellfleet. 'A Cape Cod Notebook' won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing.