Blizzards

BOSTON — It's snowing here.

Really snowing. Snowing enough that you can call home to Wisconsin and say "We're in the middle of a huge blizzard!" without getting that little Midwestern silence that means that while you've said something foolish, it would be too embarrassing to everyone involved to actually discuss it.

News sites feel the need to call the current deluge of snow "deadly." But the snow's defining factor is not death; it's burying thousands upon thousands of square miles in a huge, thick white blanket of snow. That's happened all across the Eastern Seaboard. Look at traffic statistics for an average holiday weekend, and the blizzard toll looks reasonable, if still sad.

Snow-related deaths don't define a modern blizzard.

It's important to separate "modern" from "old-fashioned." In the old days, blizzards were no laughing matter. You got cut off from your supplies. The diphtheria serum ran out. You starved to death, you got lost in huge snow drifts, you got stuck eating your own horses and everything basically went wrong.

Unless you happened to be somewhere totally warm, safe and well-provisioned, the snow didn't inspire wonder; it inspired pure, blind, totally reasonable fear.

Some of these people still apparently linger around Boston, where they buy all the bread, eggs and milk 24-48 hours before any given snowstorm actually hits. Meanwhile, the rest of us — all born well after 1850, thank you very much — are stuck wandering around Star Market buying Lactaid and wondering what it is about hamburger buns that would make them such a hot commodity in the face of an advancing natural disaster.

Or any bakery item, for that matter. We live in modern America. We have snowplows. This storm can and will be licked, probably within six hours of the last flake hitting the ground.

The beautiful thing about a storm of this magnitude — beyond the wave after infinite wave of snowflakes that plunge from the sky like a trillion tiny, miniature alien stormtroopers — is the buildup. Stand around on the street at the beginning of a real blizzard, and you're in a play. People glance around nervously. They hustle down the street. People gesticulate, they laugh, they dash from place to place. They wonder if the bus is going to come. They watch the few cars left on the main drag struggle through the small drifts and piles of snow that have already begun to accumulate.

We are sharing a catastrophe. We chat, we smile, we break through the thick, viscous barrier that keeps Yankees from talking to one another like human beings unless it's absolutely necessary.

We're all human in a blizzard.

It's exhilarating.

And then the walk home. You leap piles of snow, only to land in other piles of snow. The wind whips lashes of white stuff across your face. Cars stagger slowly through the snow-strewn streets, just trying to maintain traction. The mundane cityscape you're faced with day after day has become a crazed lunar battleground. Civilization has receded. Everything you're used to — Cars, buildings, roads — is all slowly being pushed into the netherworld by nature's intense white eraser. It's amazing, and if it weren't a little scary, you might linger longer.

But you make your way home. You want to be home.

And this is the best part of a blizzard: Once indoors, you can stay indoors. You can have some cocoa. You can watch Iron Chef. You can make chicken wings, and have a White Russian, and it's all okay; you've Survived Something. It's still going on outside, but you've got your heat, you've got your light, and you're okay.

It feels phenomenal to just sit by window and watch the plows go by, their yellow lights spinning crazily as they shove aside tons of frozen water.

Why is this natural thing — this weather condition — such a thrill?

It's just enough chaos to be fascinating, and to have a real edge... but not enough chaos to bring us down. Coddled, soft, protected and bored, Americans thrill easily enough to the few real shocks that get under our radar.

A blizzard's a good one. We are all transformed, and we are all brought together. Nature comes incarnated as a raging octopus of wind and snow, it shakes up the world, and it blows out of town.

"Someday," we all think, "I can bore my grandchildren with this story."

And it will, indeed, be boring. But not to you.

You survived the Blizzard of '03.

— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)

— photography by Brian Lewandowski (bigbri@exclamation-point.com)