‘Every county has a ‘Snow Day Stick,’ though it’s not always a stick and it’s not always for snow days. A ‘Snow Day Stick’ can be anything, really, and it’s often disguised as something mundane, to keep attention at a minimum, or dangerous, to keep people away. A ‘Snow Day Stick’ is more of a concept, than an actual physical object, though its physicality is integral. A ‘Snow Day Stick’ is the item a county uses to measure weather conditions and precipitation.
I suppose we could have led with that.
As the name suggests, most ‘Snow Day Sticks’ used to be some variation of a yardstick standing in a bowl or cup made to capture rain and snow. In the pre-wireless days it was the job of some unlucky gofer to trek out to the thing at regular intervals to take the measurement and they did so with little to no training. It was the perfect example of an ‘it ain’t broke’ system right up until the early internet emerged with its dangerously unmoderated chatrooms and a kid in North Dakota described how he could make snow days by piling the snow just right against the ‘Snow Day Stick.’ The ineptitude or indifference of the county’s gofer and the failure of anybody at the news station to question hard data formed the perfect storm.
As luck would have it, conditions were primed for a storm across the country.
With this pre-lifehack lifehack unleashed on dial-up, the fictional storm ‘Balthazar’ seemed to rage across the nation, cancelling schools in the north for snow and in the south for the likelihood of flash floods though nobody seemed to be experiencing conditions outside of the norm. It was two full days before meteorologists and civilians who had previously convinced themselves that they had just ‘gotten lucky’ started talking to each other and discovered the foul play. ‘Balthazar’ had only ever been the meddling of a couple hundred kids who found their local ‘Snow Day Stick’ in tandem.
The initial reaction to this short-lived phenomenon was the right one. Gofers were trained and some went on to become the meteorologists we know and love today. The story doesn’t end there, however.
The original ‘Snow Day Stick’ story made the rounds again in 2013, drudged up from the depths of the internet and made into a sort of meme-legend. The new generation of troublemakers quickly discovered that the well-trained gofers had been done away with and that most ‘Snow Day Sticks’ had become wireless measuring tools and were, therefore, even easier to fool than humans. ‘Balthazar’ was reborn for a short, 24 hours of meteorological confusion.
These trans-generational shenanigans are why, today, a ‘Snow Day Stick’ may be a statue in town square with subtly marked inches and a graceful pool for collection rainfall. It may be a hollow false tree that hums with electricity under its bark and kills birds unlucky enough to roost there. It may be the foundation of a house, marked inconspicuously with coded graffiti- kept that way: pristine and unfinished. It may be a bird bath that appears in your lawn one day with a menacing chickadee and a thick cord of wires that disappears into the ground nearby. These are the desperate measures that weather stations have taken to fool the youth and to keep ‘Balthazar’ from waking again. They will tell you there is no such thing as a ‘Snow Day Stick-‘ that these measurements are taken by a diverse series of complex tools with multiple redundancies.
Don’t be fooled, young readers. Every county has a ‘Snow Day Stick.’ All you have to do is find it.’
-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside
