Tossing a Snowball into a Creek, by Owen Schroeder

It has snowed yet again! The trees are fresh with it as it continues to blow around me.  The sounds around me are hushed except for the rapid tempo pitter-patter of snow being smacked against my hood. The winds glide by not forcefully but instead with a steady purpose and flow. Thankfully the wind isn’t angry or sharp like other days in this long winter.

The water flowing to my left is absorbing all that the sky is giving while the banks grow higher and higher hiding the sand and rocks completely. Currently, I am bored, don’t want to be here, and feel as if none of the scenery has changed from the last time it snowed (probably a slanted view since I’m freezing). My bored self pulls me to do what every boy does around a body of water… throw something into it!

I lightly toss a snowball underhand into the water and just stare at it. On impact it sinks deep adding a small ripple, which is quickly absorbed into the greater rippling mass of water. It quickly rebounds back to the surface and then moves with a small bobbing motion with its distance from the surface diminishing at an increasing rate. As it settles on the surface it is pulled away slowly at first with it’s color changing as it soaks up more and more water, and then as its speed doubles with its proximity to the falls it just breaks apart completely dissolving into the stream.

I know I’ve been working too hard when all thinking about is defining the constraints and the objective function for some kind of maximization problem with snow’s ability to melt in moving water. I’m not sure what I’d make the objective function be, maybe something like “how many snowballs would have to be thrown in for the stream to not be able to absorb them anymore?” The constraints are easy however; you’d have to account for the rate of absorption being affected by the amount of snow already absorbed. That should be a simple enough equation to find and then another constraint would have to be how quickly the water is traveling downstream. To make the experiment more realistic there could be a time constraint, so maybe snowballs could only be thrown in for one minute.

But aside from the math there’s that whole philosophical side to thinking about the snowball. In The Forest Unseen’s preface he mentions William Blake’s poem Auguries of Innocence, a poem in which I had to memorize the first stanza of back in high school. That stanza’s meaning, which says that human instinct is to compare a small universe with his own. As I breathe deeply and let go of the annoying math thoughts, I try and compare myself with the snowball in the water. The ball enters a foreign environment, and then bounces back and forth between varying positions, but eventually it settles in and is absorbed into something greater.

I think I’m a bit like the snowball. For example when I joined the triathlon club here my freshman year and I’ve done some bouncing myself like trying to make power plays to get an officer position, but after finding my set place (the water’s surface) I’ve let myself be absorbed into something bigger than a position of power I have. Instead I’m part of a whole club, a group of friends, and a family, something greater. And while I know this is only a small example, I hope I can incorporate the teachings of the snowball into my life because it’s really quite hard to let go and be absorbed into a larger group or environment, or anything really, but all in all I’ve learned that it is worth it.

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