My Crocs lost purchase on the vestal slurry carpeting the sidewalk. One foot slid forward while the other slid back, and I felt the entirety of my life with functioning hip abductors flash before my eyes. I was too young to strain a muscle walking in the snow and way too old to successfully hit the splits. Snow had descended upon Tufts and I was not prepared.
Miraculously, I managed to survive my near catastrophic fall and absconded back to my dorm unharmed, albeit embarrassed and with snow-laden shorts. Although I may not have been prepared, many students at Tufts certainly were. As the very first sprinklings of snow began to accumulate on the ground, I watched my jacketed peers emerge from the comfort of their heated dorms and begin hasty construction on those cold, cozy effigies of song: snowmen.
The ritual of building snowmen is, in some ways, as bizarre as it is ubiquitous. Whenever it snows, we collectively construct frosty anthropoid representations, accepting that three balls of descending size are a suitable stand-in for the human form. Snowmen, or snowmen-like constructions, are present across cultures and climates with snow — even snowless New Mexicans build snowmen from tumbleweeds. The world’s largest snowperson – Maine’s snow-woman Olympia – almost measures up to the Statue of Liberty. The smallest snowman is not even 3 micrometers, although snow is swapped for silica in this instance. Taking an even more liberal definition of a snowman, it could be argued that our solar system’s largest snowperson is Arrokoth, a frosty, red Kuiper belt object. How festive!
The extension of the term ‘snowman’ to refer to a 36 kilometer long minor planet hurtling through the outskirts of the Solar System is an incredible illustration of the distortion of the human form. We search for ourselves everywhere, forming icy companions from the abundant snow that isolates us indoors. It is satisfying — and comforting — to know that we can find ourselves in the snow, in microscopic silica particulate, in the alien emptiness of our galaxy. We successfully create and procreate — at least until the snow melts.
Impermanence, I believe, is the central quality of the snowman that makes him so sympathetic to us, allowing him to truly exist in our image. We, like snowpeople, are ultimately mortal. Although we are resilient enough to survive direct sunlight, we must accept our evanescence as beautiful. As the Statue of Liberty is a monument to freedom, Olympia memorializes the ephemeral life, a melting testament to human creation and effort of monstrous proportions. Even Michelangelo purportedly partook in snowmanship, sculpting a statue of snow for Piero de’Medici. The greatest sculpture work of Michelangelo may have melted to water in just a few days, lost to history, yet preserved in memory alone.
Using spheres to construct a snowman is actually another vain attempt to extend our mortality, as the reduced surface area and packed snow lead to a more durable snowman. But even spherical snowmen melt all the same; complicit in their creation is the acceptance of their death. We are transfixed not by their whimsical existence alone, but by their fugacious end, mirroring the titular snow man of a Hans Christian Andersen story who would shun his wintery environment and very life to gaze upon a woodfire stove whom he loves.
Impermanence makes beauty more tenuous, more desperate, more real. There’s snow time like the present.
