"That wall of snow hit my house with hurricane force. The blizzard of the century had arrived." How celebrated Canadian post-hardcore band Alexisonfire distilled the horror of a ruinous five-day storm on Crisis, the title track of their 2006 masterpiece

Dallas Green, Wade MacNeil, Chris Steele, Jordan Hastings and George Pettit in 2006.

On the morning of Friday, January 28, 1977, author Erno Rossi stood at his window and looked at a flock of geese feeding on the corn he’d spread on the froze surface of Lake Erie. Then something strange happened.

“Suddenly the geese all collapsed on their breasts onto the ice facing into the breeze,” he wrote in his book White Death: Blizzard of ’77. “They then pulled their feet up into their breast feathers. Twisting their necks backwards, they then tucked their bills and heads into their back feathers.