Travis Gidado and the Snow Owl on Old Campus

It was a Saturday night in early December, and I was returning from a concert in New York City with my a cappella group. At this point, the weather was extremely cold (at least for a Floridian like myself, although I started complaining about the temperatures in October), but it wasn’t quite cold enough for us to experience snowfall. I was one of the few Yalies who never experienced (or cannot remember experiencing) a legitimate snow event before arriving on campus, and I admit I was eager to finally watch snow descend slowly upon Yale’s many beautiful buildings. We were 45 minutes away from campus when I noticed what appeared to be raindrops falling from the sky in large, crystalline clumps.

“Why is the rain accumulating so weirdly on the windshield,” I asked a member of my tap class sitting next to me in the backseat.

“That’s because it’s not rain…it’s snowing outside,” he responded rather flippantly, until he realized that I was being completely serious.

I’m not going to lie…I was pretty embarrassed. I mean, I joked about probably being unable to recognize snowfall the first time I saw it happening in front of my eyes, but I never once believed that would actually be the case. Once my embarrassment subsided, I called my roommate to find out whether or not it started snowing in New Haven as well. He simply responded, “Everyone is playing in the snow. Get back as soon as you can.”

I returned to a scene that was nothing short of pandemonium. A thin layer of soft, white snow covered my residential college. People were running around tightly bundled up in several layers of clothing. I forgot to mention that the concert we did was in black tie, and so I found myself inadvertently sliding around in my tuxedo and traction-less dress shoes trying to get back to Old Campus before I fell on my face. I dodged a few snowballs as I entered High Street Gate and discovered most of my peers walking around outside, making snow angels, or taking pictures of the contained chaos.

When I finally got to the front steps of my entryway, a few of my friends were in the middle of making something out of clumps of snow they collected prior to my arrival. I asked them what they were planning to create, and of course, they

responded, “we’re making a snow owl…and we’re probably naming it Hedwig.” Now, I know we Yalies commonly joke about Yale being like Hogwarts, but this seemed kind of excessive. However, as I was grabbing my red-and-yellow Trumbull scarf, which was too reminiscent of what Harry Potter might wear in Gryffindor, I embraced the comparison more than ever. I ran out the door to meet my friends, and was promptly greeted by a snowball to the chest.
That palatial scene was followed by about a week of intermittent snowfall, culminating in a massive snowstorm that left me stranded in Hartford's airport the night after my final examination of the semester. Snow and I have developed a complicated relationship since then, but I won’t soon forget that first snowfall I experienced here at Yale and the ridiculous larger-than-life-sized owl my friends made to commemorate the event.