A Winter's Tale

‘Tis the season.

Your Bloguero left work early today because it was snowing hard, the roads were already slick,it was getting dark, and soon the roads would be impassable.Two obstacles to the trek.First, your Bloguero in a moment of supreme distraction dropped his car keys in the deep, fresh snow. He searched his tracks but could not find them. Thoughts of hitching a ride home for the spare keys and returning for the car. Or maybe staying home and hitching a ride back in the morning. Who to call? Better to search more thoroughly. Better to continue searching. Hence, a painstaking search, with your Bloguero distracted by this: a few years ago he dropped a mailbox key in the snow in the driveway and lost it. He could not find it. He had to wait four months for the snow to melt before it reappeared. Was this the sequel? He sighed. Better to keep searching. At long last, your Bloguero discovered a small hole in the fresh snow, and at its bottom he found the car keys. Crisis averted. Time at last to drive the snow covered road.

Obstacle two. In Eastern New York the weather is beastly. It snows a lot. The temperatures get so cold that car seats make a distinctive “crunk” sound when you sit on them. And when you then turn the key, the engine makes a single metallic sound, “Sput.” It does not start. Then there is silence. The silence of deep snow and zero degrees and an anemic blue sun. You sit in the driver seat, your breath rapidly fogging the inside of the window with ice. Best to give up. Your Bloguero knows this is a common experience. Too cold to start. You’d think with such a harsh, unforgiving teacher everyone in Eastern New York would learn about winter. Wrong.

On today’s after work commute, usually 20 uneventful minutes on two lane blacktop Routes 9-H and 66 and County 9 and Route 203 filled with the hushed sound of NPR, your Bloguero drove at less than 18 miles per hour behind a minivan with tires too bald to go up or down the snowy hills safely. This cautious citizen created a long string of impatient cars and wallowing trucks that crept dangerously close to each other on every up and down for miles. As time elapsed, the string grew longer and longer, the bright lights coruscating, an impatient, floating, halogen and mercury constellation, aimed for the North Star. Your Bloguero eventually arrived at his destination.

Your Bloguero is not dismayed by inclemency. The shortest day of the year is coming. The Holidays. Some vacation time, if you are lucky. Your Bloguero has said it before and it bears repeating: days like today are demonstrations of the reasons why so many farmers left here as soon as they could and headed for more temperate climes. It’s this very kind of unremitting, beastly weather that forged America’s 18th century history and the drive West.

May your Winter be kind, and may you and your loved ones be warm.

The Nemo Blues

Your Bloguero is in the kitchen (he aint got no shoes) with the Nemo Blues.

Nemo. What a diminutive name for a colossal northeaster. A name that's cute, like that small pixilated fish. You would think that the media fear mongers would come up with something like Stormzilla or Stormpocalypse, something that would excite and fit, but no, whoever is in the storm-naming department: Fail. And/But your Bloguero digresses. The short: there is a lot of snow outside. And it's cold. And everything is closed or closing: the trains, the airports, the restaurants, the saloons, the roads, the markets, the convenience stores. And the idea is that the snow will continue all night, and the wind will blow it around, and in the morning, there will be lots of snow on the ground and it will still be falling. Things will remain closed. Road crews will earn overtime. You can make French toast with the milk and eggs and bread you ran out for yesterday.

Your Bloguero says, "Let it snow."

This storm made worse because our local NPR station, WAMC in Albany, is on fund raising, and has been since Monday. They are trying to raise $1 million dollars. C'mon say it like Mini Me. In other words, there is no soothing regular programming. No. There is fundraising. There is asking for money. And a drawing now for a deluxe Miele vacuum cleaner. Your Bloguero did not make this up.

Your Bloguero suggests TCM movies, or Netflix streaming, or reading. Or CineMoi. Or Pay per view. And rum. Rum with lime in it and whatever else you might have. Look: you're not going anywhere. Not now, not tomorrow morning. You are home. You cannot leave. May as well make the best of it.

The only thing your Blogero lacks at the moment is El Bloombito's hablando en Espanol cerca el nieve y la tormenta y no estacionar en las calles. Your Bloguero knows this is coming, and he's waiting for it. Gleefully. The language is going again to be a casualty. Just wait.

Stay warm, stay tuned.

Man In The Holocene

Today's interminable snow reminds of Max Frisch's brilliant short novel, Man In The Holocene (Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän)(1979).

This summary gives the idea:

The aged Mr. Geiser is bored in his Tessin house during torrential rains. He is so bored that he tries to make a pagoda out of crispbread and categorizes thunders (into rolling thunders, banging thunders etc.). His sole companion is his cat.

Rumors report a landslide, cutting off the valley. Fearing a large slide that would bury the village and man’s knowledge, Geiser reads in his encyclopedia, the Bible, and history books. At first he makes notes and attaches them to the walls; later he cuts paragraphs from the books and tapes them instead, noting sadly that the front sides of the encyclopedia’s pages are visible, but the back sides unfortunately are dissected and destroyed.

Despite the weather, he wanders outdoors. While wandering, he notes his physical limits, and the limits of man’s knowledge and importance.

He notes man's insignificance and meaninglessness (man's appearance in the Holocene era is a very recent event in evolutionary terms).. The old man is exposed to the cycle of life and his mortality.

Geiser has to admit that „der Mensch bleibt ein Laie“ (his man stays a rookie). He slowly loses his memory. He wonders if memory was necessary – "the rocks do not need my memory or not". Towards the end, Geiser suffers cerebral apoplexy that attacks his memory.

I too must be losing my memory. I thought the initial problem in the book, the cause of the protagonist's isolation, was snow and not rain. Snow like today's snow. Isolation like today's isolation. The snow continues here.

Snow Day

There is a ton of snow today. The official NOAA prediction was for 6 to 16 inches. I think we've exceeded that. By a quite lot. And it's still coming down. And blowing. And there seem to be "white outs."

Everything is canceled. If it weren't, you couldn't get there anyway. Route 203, a state highway maintained by the New York State DoT, as I write this, is a snowmobile track running down the middle of the roadway. The few trucks crawling cautiously down the road straddle the middle line. And go very, very slowly. If you wanted to, you could cross-country ski down the middle of this road into town. But why would you do that? The general store closed two months ago. So there's nowhere to stop for coffee. Or hot chocolate. Or anything else.

The snow is great for skiing. You could go skiing, if you could get to the slopes. But, of course, you can't because that requires the use of the roads. So today is a Snow Day. A stay at home day. A fire in the fireplace day. A why won't the dog and cat go out day. A maybe I'll just go back to bed with a book day.

Later, when the snow has stopped and the State has plowed the roads, we will all try to figure out how to move that mountain at the side of the road that blocks entry to and from the driveway. We will wish we had a front loader. We will wish we had a snow blower. We will break the handles on our analog snow shovels. We will talk about how we deserve to be sitting at the turquoise sea.

If you want to understand the growth of the 18th Century United States from the Eastern Seaboard to the interior of this continent, you just look out the window. It doesn't snow like this in England or Holland. This kind of snow, this kind of Nor'easter, is unbelievable. The movement West may have had something to do with the depletion of farmland caused by growing the same crops over and over again, but it was also the weather. Definitely. I cannot imagine this without central heating. I cannot imagine this in an uninsulated log cabin. It's enough to make you pack up all of your family and possessions and head for the setting sun at the first available chance, driving due southwest.

Stay warm, be safe, enjoy.

The Blizzard of 2010

This is Warren Street, the main street of Hudson, New York at the tail end of the Blizzard.

Twenty inches of snow seems to be about the total, and now the wind is howling and blowing high drifts. Dog and I are contemplating a nap.

How Long, How Much Longer, How Long?

The NY Times warns:

The National Weather Service predicted about a foot of snow for New York City overnight, with the heaviest snowfall starting at 9 p.m. and continuing until 7 a.m. or 8 a.m. Monday. Periods of snow were likely to continue throughout Monday afternoon....snip

The looming storm has sent the city scurrying to prepare....snip

New York City-area courts planned to remain open Monday, but thousands of new jurors were told not to report for duty in New York, Westchester, Rockland, Putnam, Dutchess and Orange counties, said David Bookstaver, a spokesman for the state office of Court Administration.The jurors hearing pending cases may come to court if the judge orders, he said... snip

“A foot of snow is significant and will cause significant travel problems late tonight and into tomorrow morning,” said Michael Silva, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Upton, N.Y.

Doh. "Significant travel problems" is bureaucratic talk for forget about going anywhere on Monday. But I have a question about this winter. Actually, legendary bluesman Leroy Carr had the question, though he wasn't asking it about winter, "How long, baby, how much more longer, how long?":



Sorry for ultra boring video, but you get the idea.

2008 Ends With Snow

Just as it began. With two crows in the tree. And snow. Plenty of snow.

May you have a joyful, prosperous and healthy New Year!

The First Snow

Maybe all of the people who lost power during the ice storm have gotten their power turned back on. I hope they have. Because now we're having a massive snow storm. The prediction for tonight is up to 16 inches of snow.

The New York Times reports:

Airplanes huddled at their gates, schools closed and salt trucks skittered across icy highways on Friday as the winter’s first major storm clawed its way across the country, blasting millions of Americans in the Midwest and Northeast with snow squalls and blistering winds. ...

[A]nd more than 500 flights were canceled at the three airports in the New York area.

Planes bound for John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City were being delayed three hours and 20 minutes while flights into LaGuardia were being delayed two hours, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Flights into Newark International Airport were lagging five hours behind schedule.

Road travel was treacherous from county roads in Iowa to interstates in Massachusetts as the storm shellacked highways with a layer of treacherous black ice and frosted it with several inches of snow. In one corner of northeast Iowa, officials were forced to pull snowplows off the road because of whiteout conditions.

It's snowing very hard as I write this. The flakes are small ones, and, of course, all sound is muffled. All lights in the distance are dimmed. There is no traffic. The dog lies in the snow and rolls on her back. The fire crackles. And, of course, it's pitch dark at 4:45 pm.

Earlier, I drove to Agway in Chatham to buy bird seed. The feeders were empty, and two had fallen down in the ice storm. I put them back up, and I filled them. But there were no birds late this afternoon, and I did not hear them. They were huddled in safe places, waiting, waiting patiently, waiting for the storm to end. The man at Agway said the storm would be a quick one with a very deep snow. Out here we endow feed retailers with special expertise in these outdoor matters.

I can only hope that all who need to find shelter find it. This is not a good night to be stranded on city street. Or in a car.

I also hope that all who are safe and warm can go briefly outside and enjoy without any mediation the profound beauty of this first, big snow storm.