snow....... in texas?

"It's snowing!" says the guy at the paper-stall.
"Big deal", i thought as they charged off to the aiport window
I was about to learn that snow is bit of a novelty in the great state of texas. Space shuttles falling out of the sky: no problem, but the cold white stuff - thats a tricky business.

I'm not entirely sure what was going on during the hours that followed as we sat helpless in our grounded plane.

I have several theories:

Firstly that the texans were genuinely confused by what they saw. Perhaps like african children meeting a white person for the first time; they had to touch it, stroke it - see if it was safe.
Perhaps they were suspicious; had to send it to a laboratory to check exactly what it was made of.

Our pilot seemed to have a pretty sound idea. He knew that he was not allowed to fly with the stuff on his plane - messed up his aerodynamics or something.
He also would have known that snow is not an uncommmon phenomenon in american cities farther north, and that they deal with it rather efficiently by spraying aerolplanes with huge jets of de-icer.

Perhaps during the (not inconsiderable) time whilst we sat, on the snowy runway, he popped down to the local garage to buy up their stocks of de-icer.
If he did there evidently wasn't tnough in stock else he'd have got us right on our way.

He may have remembered that the de-icer spraying machine looked remarkably like a small elephant spraying itself with water. He may have sent some of the cabin crew to the local zoo to borrow an elephant. maybe in the absence of de-icer said elephant wouldn't have minded spraying warm water?

He may have considered that at the speed with which we were not moving up the queue of aeroplanes requiring the de-icing process, he could have driven to somewhere like new york, borrowed their industial de-icer machine and returned to de-ice our plane.

I suppose I will never know what went on during the eight hours between our boarding our plane and our getting airborne. Nor will I learn of the conversations that went on between the pilots and the ground crews and whether they really did have to teach them what to do with an aeroplane in the snow.
I did get the impression that the pilot was not massivley impressed however; not from anything he said for he was perfectly professional, but when he was finally given permission to proceed to the runway he was on full throttle like a hound out of a trap. Then he started to bank the plane having barely lifted his wheels from the tarmac and completed an impressively low steep turn pretty much within the boundary fence of the aiport.

He, like us all, seemed keen to be on his way.