So much for escaping rough winters

Welcome to my world — or, rather, the world from which I escaped.

This year, Central Virginia is getting a taste of what it’s like to live in central New York. Native Virginians are learning that while one snowstorm is nice and Currier-and-Ivesish, No. 2 is annoying and No. 3 a huge aggravation. They’ve come to see that when snow remains on the ground for more than a week, it often mutates into a rock-hard, grayish-brown substance that is neither snow nor dirt, but something nasty in between.

“They pile the snow up so high (in Upstate New York) that it’s like you’re driving through canyons,” said Bob Embrey, of Lynchburg, who lived in Syracuse during much of the 1970s. “Every intersection you come to, you have to honk your horn to let the drivers on the cross street know you’re there. At night, you flash your brights.”

Not everyone hates snow, of course. Kids love it, because it gets them out of school. Ski resorts love it, because it’s hard to ski on bare ground. Hardware stores love it, because they sell lots of snow shovels and rock salt. And grocery stores love it, because customers swarm their aisles like locusts when a storm is approaching.

The rest of us, not so much. Snow is hard to drive in, hard to walk in and often hard to see through.

“I don’t miss it,” said Jennifer Bennett, an assistant Lynchburg commonwealth’s attorney who grew up in Syracuse. “Not a bit.”

When her time in Syracuse was over, she moved to Arizona.

“Today,” said Genworth programmer (and Utica, N.Y., native) David Plude on Friday, “I’m thinking maybe I didn’t go far enough south.”

I don’t mean to come across like a snow snob. We got a lot of snow in Syracuse and thereabouts, but there are places that get more. And the snow there isn’t any different than what’s falling here now — just a lot more of it, as a general rule, Like, 150 inches some years.

As a resident there, I survived the Blizzard of ’66 (42 inches), numerous other snowfalls between 20-30 inches and February of 1971, which saw 72 inches of snow (nearly my height) fall from the heavens in 28 days. During the latter snowfest, my car was completely buried in a communal shuttle lot near Syracuse University, forcing me to spend two nights at the downtown YMCA.

That incident is what convinced me to move to South Carolina. So the first winter my wife, Gail, and I lived in Columbia, it snowed 16 inches one weekend — the Snow of the Century.

Before my mom came down to Lynchburg from Lake George, N.Y. to spend this winter with us, I assured her that it rarely snows here.

“We got something like three inches last year,” I said. “The year before that, I don’t think it snowed at all.”

For a variety of reasons, Central Virginia has a lot of expatriate New Yorkers. Some migrated down with General Electric when a plant moved here from Syracuse. Others are college students, or were transferred here with other industries. They all have their memories.

“We hardly ever got snow days for school,” Bennett said. “We walked there, and you just hoped that everyone along the way got out and shoveled their sidewalks.”

Both Bennett and Plude have noticed a difference in snow removal tactics between North and South.

“They don’t treat the roads ahead of time here like they do up there,” Bennett said. “I think they’re a little better prepared (in New York).”

“It always seems to be a reactive sort of thing,” Plude added. “Of course, I can’t get too upset. I mean, why would they buy all this equipment here when it only snows once in a while?”

A difference I’ve noticed is that it’s rarely bitterly cold and snowing at the same time in Virginia. On bad days in Upstate New York, we saw the Four Horsemen of the Weather Apocalypse — snow, ice, temperatures near zero and fierce winds.

“In Syracuse, you expected snow,” Embrey said. “It was a given. The only question was how much.”

Even “when” was open-ended.

“One year, it snowed on Halloween and on Mother’s Day,” Embrey said.

Here, we hang on until March. Syracusans dream of June.