This post is contributed by Barnaby Porter from his archives. Read the previous post here.
They talk about snowflakes. No two are alike, they say. Isn’t it remarkable, we think to ourselves, that there should be such mind-boggling variety in the shapes of simple things? How could there be room for so much variety, or even enough numbers to account for every one? And yet there are, and if there were twice as many snowflakes, there would still be enough shapes and numbers to go around.
The same could be said of grains of sand, blades of grass, pine trees, fingerprints and people’s faces. There are obvious similarities among the named, for sure, but a cold hard look at two of any group would quickly see where the similarity ends; it ends with the very next specimen. Each is an individual, having certain peculiarities shared with no other and, as such, is on its own to face infinity as one of a kind.
So what?
Exactly.
But there’s something unsettling about this notion. We poor creatures like lumping things together in tidy categories; it’s so much neater and helps keep the world organized and familiar. If a guy can’t count on something so common and ordinary as snowflakes to maintain a nice dependable, crystalline structure, what then can he count on?
The situation is that this business of no two being alike is just one of those nitpicker’s ideas that caught on a long time ago, and it has been straining our sensibilities ever since. “Gee whiz,” we say. “That’s pretty hard to believe.” And the next impulse is to start looking at snowflakes with a magnifying glass to make sure, to see if you can’t come up with a “match” to dispel this nonsense.
Well, I say, so what if no two are alike? They look pretty much alike to me, alike enough to make a snow drift, to pile up in the woods and blanket the land all in white. If a body is going to let himself get all cranked-up about the dissimilarities between the snowflake over here and that one over there, he’s going to miss the whole show.
Certainly, snowflakes are lovely things, and one can celebrate their beauty by cutting them out of white paper with a pair of scissors, but if he even begins to contemplate scissoring out a fair representation of all the possibilities that exist, more than likely he will go stark, raving mad. It would be akin to trying to make a complete collection of all the matchbooks in the world.
I have my own solution to this dilemma. I simply go out and clank and rattle around, attaching the snow plow to the front of my pickup truck. Let it snow, I say. The more the better. By the time I’m done plowing, I figure I’ve got a damned good snowflake collection piled up in front of the barn, and if they all want to be different, each and every one, so be it.
Artist and author Barnaby Porter has had a varied career in marine research, aquaculture, and woodworking, among others. Most recently he partnered with his wife Susan as co-owners of the Maine Coast Book Shop & Cafe in downtown Damariscotta. In October 2021, Barnaby completed his tenure on Coastal Rivers’ Board of Trustees after six years of service.
Snowflake images by Wilson Bentley.
