Blessed, normal blizzard
In a sign that someone might have been writing a column for too long, I experienced the Wednesday-night-thursday-morning blizzard as a sort of tour through memories of articles I’d written about the aftermaths of previous storms. They were doozies, too, though we don’t seem to remember them as the years pass — which is the blessing and the curse of experience, that it all seems to run together.
In the same way that Picasso did a lot of paintings of naked women with their noses out of proper perspective and Jerry Lewis falls down often in his movies, I have come to the realization in what I hope is midlife that I like to write about snowstorms. Like that time in 2011 when I described my talent for convincing total strangers to give me their keys and let me drive their cars out of snowbanks by speaking the talismanic words “I used to live in Wyoming.” Or the 2012 column in which I described taking my 11-year-old son and his buddy sledding at Capital Hills. And the time in 2014 when I captivated readers with my thrilling account of not dying while raking the roof from the precarious perch of my house’s secondfloor porch roofs.
No, this isn’t a roundabout promotion for “Seiler on Snow: An Anthology,” but rather an elaborate setup for — yes! — another column about a monster snowfall ... but this time with a pandemic twist.
Let me once again stipulate that snowstorms are a trial for communities as well as individuals — costly, logistically challenging, obviously perilous. Thursday brought terrible stories about a snowmobiler killed as he took a ride on I-787 at the height of the storm and a young girl accidentally buried by a family member’s plowing. Less mortal danger will be presented by thrown-out backs and other far more mundane injuries.
These days, merely going to a restaurant or the grocery store comes with health risks. After a week that is quite literally the best of times (Monday’s first regular vaccination of a U.S. citizen — and a New Yorker) and the very worst of times (as the nation hit new daily records for deaths and infections) in our often ham-handed battle with the coronavirus pandemic, there was a measure of equally literal cold comfort in the familiar crisis of a storm.
Or that’s the way it felt as I watched my new dog tearing around the backyard in the first deep snow this recent Kentucky transplant has ever seen. It felt good to sweat out the worst of the shoveling while it was still coming down on Thursday morning. There was a certain reassurance to see neighbors at a distance outdoors doing the same things they did in an earlywinter storm a year ago — such as grousing about how the city
plow had re-dumped snow onto the sidewalk we had just cleared. (I know, they’ve got work to do and snow doesn’t always land where you want it to.)
There was even an appearance by the anonymous secular saint known as Neighborhood Snowblower Guy, who roams the Pine Hills like some masterless Nordic samurai clearing the sidewalks of strangers’ homes. At the end of a year where it often felt like the fabric of our nation was coming apart at the seams — over presidential politics, racial injustice, contempt for my profession, plus the pandemic’s stressors — this act of kindness felt even more like a blessing.
Friday morning, we woke early to move our cars to the opposite side of the street. Circling the block down a one-way, we found our path impeded by a smallish SUV that had foundered while trying to pull out. As I suspected, the driver had just moved from California, and his spinning wheels had polished the semicircles cupping his tires into glare ice.
Did I offer to drive his car out? I did. Did I mention I had once lived in Wyoming? Maybe. Did I feel a little freaked out when I actually sat in the strange-to-me driver’s seat, and relieved that the hands gripping the wheel were mittened? You betcha.
But that was the extent of the coronavirus’ mental imposition on this otherwise normal traffic crisis.
Put another way: There is a reason why the State Education Department has preserved the sanctity of snow days even when students are remote learning. Young or old, we can only leave behind a certain amount of the things that make winter normal in this part of the world.
Sometime this week, the snow will begin to subside and the streets and sidewalks will once more be passable. And I will feel slightly forlorn. But it will be a reminder that all things settle back to normality sooner or later, if you put your back into it and think about your neighbors every now and again.