What a Spokane Winter Does to the Loading Dock

People who don’t live somewhere with a real winter always picture the pretty version, snow on pine trees, that quiet hush a fresh dump gives everything, and honestly, they’re not wrong, Spokane in December is genuinely beautiful before six in the morning when nobody’s touched it yet. Snow is fun. What isn’t fun is being the one who has to clear the dock apron before the first truck rolls in, because a dock plate iced over is how somebody’s foot goes out from under them with a hand truck loaded behind them, and that’s not a theoretical risk, I’ve seen it happen twice in eight years.

The warehouse doesn’t close for weather unless it’s genuinely bad, which around here means something has to actually shut the highway down, so most winter mornings start the same way, coffee, gloves, and forty minutes of clearing and salting before receiving even opens the bay doors. My fingers go numb through the gloves faster than I’d like to admit, even the good pair, and there’s a specific kind of stubborn cold that gets into your hands doing repetitive outdoor work that no amount of coffee actually fixes, you just work through it until the blood comes back around ten.

It changes the shape of the evenings too, which is the part that actually connects to anything I write about here. Wednesday group gets smaller from about November through March, not because anyone stops wanting to play, but because getting three or four people out of their houses after dark on roads that might be bad is a bigger ask than it is in July. We’ve had nights where it’s just me and Marcus because everyone else bailed on the drive, which usually means we pull out something two-player instead of whatever six-player thing was planned, and honestly some of my favorite sessions have come out of exactly that, a smaller group than intended, playing something we wouldn’t have picked otherwise.

Dana’s clinic doesn’t close for weather either, obviously, people don’t stop needing a hospital because it snowed, so winter is also the season where her schedule and mine line up the least, which makes those Tuesday Sky Team nights feel more valuable rather than less, something we protect on purpose instead of assuming it’ll just happen. By March the dock apron’s clear most mornings, the group’s back to full size, and I always forget, every single year, how much of the winter I spent just getting through the cold part of the day before the part I actually wanted started.