“The sounds coming through our bedroom window were ominous. We recognized the “crack-crash” punctuating the almost tangible silence as the noise of snapping, falling limbs. Two decades of New England woodland living had accustomed my wife and me to the winter ice storms and clinging wet snows that ‘trim’ the pine trees. But this was early May in Massachusetts – a time of lilacs and apple blossoms.’’

Robert C. Cowen, in The American Land, on the infamous May 9, 1977 snowstorm