Memories of the ’93 Blizzard in the Deep South

When most folks think of weather in the Deep South, snow and ice rarely enter the conversation. People picture muggy summer heat, relentless humidity that hits you like a wet blanket the second you step out the door, or keeping an eye on the sky for spring severe weather and tornadoes. Cold weather down here is usually treated as a brief, inconvenient blip before we head right back into ninety-degree temperatures.

Sure, we get our usual winter cold snaps—the kind where the thermometer drops below freezing for a night or two and everything grinds to a halt. When that happens, the main event isn’t built around snowballs or sledding; it’s about survival under the house. The temperature drops, the pipes freeze, and before you know it, you’re called out to crawl under someone’s home in the dark to swap out burst PVC or split copper lines.

You do the job, wrap the pipes up with insulation, give the homeowner a nod, and hope you don’t have to see them again until spring. But if you’re lucky, you end up back under that exact same crawlspace two or three times in the same week doing the very same job. Why? Because folks around here just don’t believe in letting the water drip.

Out where we live, a lot of people were raised on old-fashioned well pumps rather than city water, and they grew up convinced that leaving a faucet dripping overnight would run the well completely dry. You can try explaining the math to them all day long—that a slow drip isn’t going to drain an aquifer—but you aren’t going to undo fifty years of Southern raising. They refuse to let it drip, the pipes freeze right back up, and back under the house you go.

Then came March 1993, and the cold gave us a lot more to worry about than just frozen plumbing.

The Great Panic, Milk, and the Frosted Cherry Pop-Tart Mystery

We weren’t in the direct bullseye of the storm like Birmingham was, but even sitting on the outer edge, we got handed a hefty blanket of snow. In our neck of the woods, the mere mention of the word “snow” on a weather broadcast sets off a level of mass hysteria that’s hard to explain to anyone living north of the Mason-Dixie line. The second a meteorologist shows a single snowflake graphic on the evening news, everyone goes completely wild.

Naturally, there’s the standard mad dash to the grocery store. People drive like madmen to strip the shelves clean of milk and bread, as if they’re preparing to be snowed in until May. But if you’ve lived around here long enough, you know about the unexplainable Walmart phenomenon: the great run on Frosted Cherry Pop-Tarts.

I still don’t fully understand the science behind it, but every single time winter weather looms over Tuscaloosa and the surrounding counties, the Frosted Cherry Pop-Tart section at Walmart gets completely wiped out. Forget brown sugar cinnamon or strawberry—it has to be Frosted Cherry. Apparently, it’s the official, non-perishable survival food of Southern winter, and folks will practically fight you in aisle four to get the last box.

Before the first actual flake even touches the dirt, the entire infrastructure of the area shuts down. Schools close early, businesses lock their doors, and city officials immediately shut down the river bridges. Out here, we have three main bridges crossing the river, and not a single one of them is flat. They’ve all got just enough of an incline that without heavy equipment, cars just slide right back down like they’re on a skating rink.

Back in ’93, county road crews didn’t have brine trucks, salt spreaders, or plows sitting in a garage waiting for action. We simply weren’t equipped for it. If they did anything at all after the storm passed, it was scattering pea gravel across the bridge decks. Personally, I’m convinced that pea gravel routine was a coordinated conspiracy between local auto body shops and windshield repair companies to ensure everyone had a cracked windshield by April.

Seven Days Trapped in the Parking Lot

Once the storm moved through and the heavy snow settled, you were stuck wherever you happened to be sitting. I spent a full, solid week trapped inside my apartment complex, completely unable to get my car past the entrance of the parking lot. The main roads were closed, the side roads were sheer ice, and nobody was going anywhere fast.

Being stuck in an apartment for seven days sounds miserable, but looking back, it made for some of the best balcony entertainment you could ask for. If you had walked out onto my porch that week and looked down at the courtyard and the parking lot entrance, this was pretty much the daily schedule of events:

Every morning started off with Act 1: The 4×4 Rescue Squad. The only souls brave (or foolish) enough to hit the roads were local guys in lifted four-wheel-drive trucks. They’d cruise around trying to make a quick buck pulling idiots out of the ditches. From my front window, I’d watch them attempt to charge up the slick incline near our complex entrance. They’d spin their tires, smoke floating everywhere, slide slowly backward down the hill, back up to get a running start, and try all over again. It was completely futile, but bless ’em, they tried it all week long.

By midday, we shifted into Act 2: The Snowman Wars. During the daytime, you’d see all the neighborhood kids bundled up in four layers of clothes, out in the courtyard building little snowmen. But as soon as night fell, the teenagers would come roaming through and smash every single one of them to pieces. The next morning? The little kids would march right back out there and build them all over again. Then the teens would come back that night. It was an endless, glorious cycle of winter warfare.

Then came the climax of the week, Act 3: The Alabama Football Incident. We even had a couple of University of Alabama football players living in our complex who managed to get themselves thrown off the property before the snow even melted. They got the bright idea to go out into the fresh, pristine courtyard snow and write their names in it—and no, they didn’t use an ink pen or a stick to do it. They got caught red-handed in the act and were given their eviction notices the second the roads cleared enough for them to pack their bags.

Meanwhile, over by my parents’ place, the neighbors got creative with their own wild ideas. They dragged a rusted old car hood out of a barn, hooked it up to the back of an ATV with a thick tow rope, and spent the afternoon yankin’ kids up and down the icy red-clay hills. I hate that I missed seeing that live—that’s Southern engineering at its finest—but staying warm and dry in my apartment was probably where I needed to be anyway.

A Taste You Can’t Save for Later

Since that massive storm in 1993, we’ve only had maybe two or three small snowstorms, and none of them were anything major. Just an inch or two—enough to shut down a couple of county buildings, let the kids out of school for a free day off, and give people an excuse to stay inside. Just your standard, easy-going Southern snow.

What I miss most about a real, heavy, blanketed snowfall, though, is what happened right after the storm settled: Snow Ice Cream.

It’s a taste and a memory you just can’t forget. It didn’t require any fancy ingredients or specialized equipment—just whatever basic pantry staples Mom had on hand and whatever fresh snow you could gather off the porch table before the dogs got to it.

The main rule of snow ice cream was that you had to eat it right then. It wasn’t something you could put up in a Tupperware container and save for later in the week. If you put leftovers in the freezer, the fluffy air pockets collapsed, the liquid separated, and it turned into a rock-solid, milky block of ice that you couldn’t even get a spoon into. You had to sit down right at the kitchen table, spoon in hand, and enjoy it while the moment lasted.

Mom’s Classic Southern Snow Ice Cream

If you ever happen to find yourself stuck in a rare Southern blizzard, here is how we always made it:

• 1 big bowl of fresh, clean snow (about a gallon, gathered off a high table or porch rail)
• 1 cup whole milk (or evaporated/condensed milk if you wanted it real rich)
• 1/2 cup granulated white sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• A tiny pinch of salt

Instructions:

1. In a small measuring cup or bowl, whisk together the milk, sugar, vanilla, and salt until the sugar crystals are completely dissolved.
2. Bring your big bowl of freshly gathered snow inside.
3. Slowly drizzle the milk mixture over the snow while folding it together gently with a big wooden spoon.
4. Keep stirring until it takes on a smooth, fluffy, soft-serve consistency.
5. Scoop it straight into bowls and eat it immediately before it turns back to water!

Looking back, the ’93 blizzard was a mess of frozen pipes, closed bridges, stranded cars, and empty grocery shelves. But for a week, time kind of stopped down here, and we all got a taste of a winter we still talk about thirty years later.