Why Is Snow White?

I grew up around snow--at about 4,000 feet above sea-level in the Sierra Nevada. That was about 1,000 feet lower than the really serious snow, but each winter we still got storms that dumped a foot here, two feet there, sometimes four feet. Before I was born, the infamous storm of 1952 hit, and it dumped so much snow that drifts piled above the roofs in town and cut the town off. Highway-plows were completely useless against such a volume of snow. Lore has it that some pregnant women, among others, got nervous.

Some people who grow up around snow remember it fondly and become lifelong ski-enthusiasts, etc. I associate it with work: shoveling, walking in it, putting chains on tires, getting cold, driving in it with appropriate caution (why some people speed up, only God knows), stoking wood fires. Snow and I are acquaintances, not enemies but not friends.

According to a variety of sources on the internet, snow is white because when light enters it, light gets bounced around off all the crystals that make up snow, and the light basically gets bounced right out. I think this happens fairly rapidly, as light is known to be in a big hurry all the time. Anyway, when it comes out, our eyes "read" it as "white." I remember digging paths through snow to and from the house, however, and essentially a snow-corridor took shape. The sides of the corridor looked positively blue at times, I assume because the light came out and/or went in at a different angle. . . . There is nothing quite like the silence of a snowed-over field, if the wind isn't blowing.

A wee poem, piled only four lines high, about a snow-childhood, then:

Childhood, Sierra Nevada

Snow fell on me.
I fell on snow.
Why it was white
I didn’t know.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

By the way, the name "Snow White" has always puzzled me. I gather it's supposed to suggest virginity or purity. But imagine meeting her in the village. "Good morning, Snow. What's going on?"