Tag: blizzard

Weather Comin’ In

jono55

The human beings of this planet are presently behaving at their most awful in so many places at once it is hard to keep one’s focus. I never aimed at having this be an anti-war, anti-fascist blog, and I try to put as much purely silly and inconsequential in each entry. But I am weak, and my anger is strong, and so it goes. I apologize for my inconstancy.

I also apologize for my country, which at present is governed by madmen and thieves. We have slipped at least six spaces back toward barbarism, and there are too many Americans who are cheering that slippage. Try as I might, I am unable to adopt the attitude expressed by Jesus while on the cross: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Part of my failure is, of course, that I am not Jesus. The other part is that I think that they do know what they do, and deserve a huge karmic slap upside the head.

And now …

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Shark Smile, by Big Thief

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Now this next one might come across as a bummer, but is it not meant that way at all. Think of it as rather a note of explanation. I am a man of eighty-six years, which means I am a potential target for a variety of problems. This week I found that one of those possibilities has taken a step forward when a very plain-spoken physician informed me that I have a cancer. It could have been a heart attack, or another stroke, but nope, it was something completely different. The extent of the problem and the treatment possibilities have yet to be determined, and are not the point of this posting.

I thought about it for a while before deciding to mention this development, because … well … I have no interest in writing a cancer journal. There are many who have done so, and have done it well. Their chronicles have given meaning and hope to a great many people. However, looking ahead I can see that there may be times that having this problem will color my attitudes and opinions in ways I can’t predict today, and I thought you readers deserved to be in on the game.

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Those of us in the resistance movements here in the good ol’ US of A are beginning to gear up for No Kings 3, which is coming on the 28th of this month. Our local Indivisible group is gathering its signboards and poster paint and costumes and is making plans to SHOW UP in as grand a style as we can muster. Do we think that a national event like this one will bring down the walls of tyranny and injustice and extremely bad taste? Of course not. So … what, exactly, are we doing?

Think of an event like this one as a county fair attended entirely by the appalled and the furious. In this bit of acting as one we give strength to one another, the sort that comes from knowing you are not alone. And we also give strength and encouragement to those who are not ready yet to stand in the street with their placard and say HELL NO to the powers that be. We want them to also see that they have millions of brothers and sisters who feel just as dismayed as they do.

It also doesn’t hurt that it seems to really piss off that clot at the top whenever we do one of these.

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Change, by Big Thief

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The crowd at the rec center is undergoing the sort of thinning that mild weather brings. Pickleballers take to the outoor courts, walkers return to the hills and paths around Montrose. The number of bicyclists on the streets has quadrupled. Motorcycles all over the place. New calves are showing up in the pastures surrounding the town. Dare I say Spring is here?

In the Midwest, where I came from, saying something like that was almost certain to bring on a killer April blizzard and send some poor souls to their eternal rest. So while thinking the words was impossible to prevent, saying them was taboo. The last one of those April calamities that I personally experienced was nearly forty years ago, in Yankton SD.

It arrived on a weekend and hit us out of bright blue skies and balmy weather. Suddenly drivers couldn’t see where they were going and were sent scuttling for home and hearth. The children were gathered in, stores were closed, streets were empty.

One gentleman pushed his luck a bit, and was the last one to leave a local bar to take the short walk to his car. He got into the vehicle, but didn’t start the engine. Perhaps all he wanted to do was rest a bit, maybe sleep off a whiskey or two. But when the wind and snow subsided the next day, he was still sitting there at the wheel, parked on that major thoroughfare, frozen to death.

The day after that I was scheduled to hold a pediatric clinic on the Santee Lakota Reservation, about an hour from Yankton. As I drove in on the narrow two-lane road, I noticed many men walking on top of the drifts along the highway, poking long bamboo poles down into the snow. When I reached the clinic I was told that there was a young couple who had been working in town, and when the bad weather came they decided to try to get home, out in the rural. That was yesterday. They never arrived.

We later received the news that the searchers’ bamboo poles hit something solid just about fifteen feet off the road I had come in on. Digging down they found the missing couple, still in their car. With the poor visibility that a blizzard affords, they had gone into a deep ditch, and there they perished, quietly waiting for the weather to clear up.

So I am not saying a durned word. It’s only March 4, and of course Spring is not here. Don’t even think about it.

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I’m reading a book on pictographs and petroglyphs written by the admirable Craig Childs. It is a captivating book, dealing primarily with the drawings left behind by natives on the Colorado Plateau more than a thousand years ago. As my interest grew, I looked around for a map and found this gem, which I now share with you. Tis a beauty. Robin and I have explored only the tiniest fraction of the riches within the 150,000 square miles that constitute the Plateau.

One of the really great things about the author is that he doesn’t tell you precisely where to find the drawings. He has no interest in sending legions of boobs out to vandalize these sites, which too often happens. If we want to bust our butts and go walking in the desert among the rattlesnakes and scorpions and across waterless cactus-scapes, we are welcome to search them out for ourselves.

(FYI: when asked once where he lived, Child gave not an address you could look up, but this statement instead: “between Telluride and Utah.”)

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Words Failing

jono55

Ran across a short article in the Times about grief, and the discomfort most of us feel when in the presence of someone who has sustained a loss. The pangs of not knowing what to say. The piece describes one phrase that definitely should be off the table as something you could offer to the sufferer:

Everything happens for a reason.

This is like handing a nice glass of Gobi desert to someone dying of thirst. It doesn’t help and may make the situation even more painful. Having been the recipient of this advice on more than one occasion, I can say that in each case I felt anger. Such fatuity, I thought, really deserves a swift kick more than a thank you.

The advice given at the end of this article resonated with me as good and true, when it is suggested that sitting there quietly is often a better choice than trying to explain the hurt away or dismiss it with platitudes.

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It’s exactly what pets do for us at such times. Offer a silent presence without asking anything of the wounded. Like I said, it’s a short piece. What were you going to do with those two minutes, anyway?

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Grief Is Only Love, by Stephen Wilson Jr.

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Last night I told Robin that we must be at the halfway point for this episode of the frigid season. Give it a few more weeks and thaws will start to appear. It’s really hard for me to feel sorry for myself when it comes to winter, but I manage. The hardships of the season here in Paradise are so puny that none of my friends from back in the Midwest will commiserate with me at all. They don’t even pretend to try. If I begin to complain to one of them, I am quickly cut off in exchanges like this one:

Me: Lord, lord, it’s cold and I am sick to death of it.
Midwesterner: The temperature here is twenty-five degrees below zero, what is it there?
Me: Twenty-five above.
Midwesterner: I think I hear my momma calling.

I can go where it is colder if I choose. All I would have to do is put on some crampons, bundle up, and start up any mountain trail above 9000 feet. But why would I do such a lamebrained thing? If I told any of my friends that I was planning to deliberately seek frostbite or fatality, they would arrange psychiatric care for me in the twinkling of an eye, and provide moral support for Robin until I got over the affliction.

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Winter, by the Rolling Stones

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From The New Yorker

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I was talking with a friend the other day about winter hardships, and happened to mention the term “ground blizzard.” This was a new term to him, so I explained it in a story.

I was returning from a visit to family members in Minneapolis, and had been asked to transport three college friends of one of my children back to South Dakota. The four of us were tooling along on Interstate 90 on a brilliant blue-sky day with so much sunshine that even with sunglasses on I squinted as I drove. It had snowed several inches over the previous week and the winter landscape was smooth, white, and beautiful. At one point as we were nearing Worthington, Minnesota I happened to glance to my right and a long way off across a large field I could see what looked like a white fog which was moving in our direction.

It was upon us so quickly that as even as I said to my passengers “What the hell … ?” we were suddenly surrounded on all sides by snow and what was now nearly zero forward visibility.

Looking out my side window I could see the white lines in the center of the road alongside our car and I crept along with only them to guide me.

I knew that we were about six miles from an exit, which now became our destination. The trip to that exit took nearly an hour, and when we pulled into the first motel we came across we took the very last room that was available. Anyone who arrived after us was given a few square feet around the swimming pool area or in the meeting rooms to use as sleeping space. All traffic in that part of the state came to an abrupt halt.

A ground blizzard occurs when a sudden and powerful gust of wind crosses an area where the snow is not packed or crusted over. It picks up that loose material and the result can present the same dangers as a true blizzard does, even though not a flake of new snow is falling.

The wind blew all that night and didn’t let up until dawn of the next day. By noon we were back to blue skies and I-90 was open. The rest of the trip was without incident.

This was the first and still the only time I’d experienced such an event, and it was unsettling. To have such extreme weather come upon you with no warning at all … can’t say I cared for it.

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Winter, by Matt Corby

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I was a precocious reader when still a sprout, starting somewhere in my fourth year and going through books and stories like a riding lawn mower through tall grass from then to the present moment, although my attention seems to wander these days more than it did.

There are literary milestones along the way that I remember clearly, markers that are idiosyncratic in my own journey rather than what yours might have been. One of them was reading Up in Michigan by Ernest Hemingway in which a rape takes place. I was still too young to understand the meaning of what I had read, but I knew it must be something bad, because when I shouted out to the kitchen, where my mother and aunt Addie were talking, what does “rape” mean, they became totally quiet and did not answer.

Then there was Jack London’s short story To Build A Fire. It might have been the very first story I ever read where the hero does not prevail.

Up until that time heroes pretty much had always won the day, but here the guy freezes to death, and I didn’t know how to process that information. Was this what life could be like? You do all the right stuff and then a random blob of snow puts out your fire and you perish? My life-view took a real hit with that one, and never completely recovered.

Reflecting, I can see that I have read quite a few stories that I was not prepared to fully understand when I first came upon them, and only looking back did they finally reveal themselves to me. Each re-read clearer than the one before.

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From The New Yorker

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Winter Light, by Linda Ronstadt

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