Remembering snow cream and war

Mack Williams

By Mack Williams

for the Salisbury Post

The other day, I tried to remember the recipe for snow cream. As far as I can recall, to the freshly fallen snow you just add milk, sugar, a few drops of vanilla extract and an egg, I think.The very thing which took us away from school also had the additional attribute of being edible. As far as I can think, no other reason for the closing of school could be consumed.

We of course, enjoyed our locally made and purchased ice cream from the business bearing the county's name, but with the making of snow cream, each bowl became our own little "Rowan Dairy," in which we saw to our individualized mixing of the ingredients. Snow seemed to be just as clean and natural a thing for the making of an ice-cold confection as the clean and clear water of a mountain stream was for drinking.

As children, we were sometimes told that a snow crystal might contain a particle of dust from some exotic place, concealed within its icy geometric design. A snowflake might have a piece of dust from the Sahara, or a bit of volcanic ash , or even the dust from micro-meteorites falling to the Earth every day.

Back in the late 1950s-1960s when I was growing up, the winters were very cold, but there was also a war with the name "cold" attached. The Cold War made some slight intrusions into our young lives, mainly limited to news footage of Soviet Premier Nikita Krushev banging his shoe on a podium at the United Nations, and on another occasion, saying: "We will bury you." The Cuban Missile Crisis did give me a nervous stomach for a few days, during which time I thought that the end of the world would soon take place.

In addition to televised evidence of the Cold War, we were given a little card with symbols of morse code printed on it, and told to always keep it with us. The different patterns of dots and dashes indicated the varying levels of severity in what we might one day hear in a siren blast, warning us of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union.

I carried this little card within my wallet in my back pocket, next to one of my favorite pocket-sized Golden Guides of the time, having to do with insects. Fortunately, there was never a need to check the little card for the identification of an unfamiliar siren blast, for no strange warning ever came, only the familiar one , signifying the fire of a house, woods or grass. If the gravest of siren sounds had ever occurred, I could have then referenced the little Golden Guide's section on cockroaches to see what the future of the world would be after a nuclear attack. As it was often said in those days, cockroaches would be the "meek" who would inherit whatever was left of the earth, following a nuclear war.

Those intrusions of that "cold conflict" we learned to deal with, the shoe banging and verbal threats. We even learned to sort of ignore the news footage of grim-faced old men wearing big fuzzy hats, standing atop Lenin's Tomb on May Ist, watching the tank and rocket parade roll by.

We couldn't; however, ignore our childhood snow confection being turned into a hazard by the above-ground testing of nuclear bombs, at places almost half a world away. Walter Cronkite warned us of radioactivity from nuclear fallout which might be present in our snowcream. This brought the Cold War down to our level, affecting one of our pastimes during our many snowed-out school days in the early 1960s. Not being in possession of a geiger counter, we could not just look at the snow and tell if it was safe.

I use the utmost delicateness, when I say that this new criteria for the identification of undesirable snow for the making of snowcream was invisible, and much more complicated than the old method, which relied solely and simply on being able to discern a difference in color.