Word: snow
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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ICICLES--SIX FEET LONG, AND AT THEIR TIPS, as bright and sharp as needles--hang from the eaves: wild ice stalactites, dragon's teeth. I peer through them to see the world transformed to abstract whiteout. Little dervish snow tornadoes twirl across the blank. The car is out there somewhere, represented by a subtle bump in the snowfield. The old Jeep truck, a larger beast, is up to its door handles, like a sinking remnant: dinosaur yielding to ice age. The town's behemoth snowplow passes on the road, dome light twirling, and casts aside a frozen doe that...
...dramatics of big weather. Down in the snowstorm, we are as mortal as the deer. I sink to my waist in a drift, I panic, my arms claw for an instant, like a drowning swimmer's, in the powder. Men up and down the storm collapse with coronaries, snow shovels in their hands, cheeks gone a deathly color, like frostbitten plums...
...metaphysics of weather: it is not that weather has necessarily grown more apocalyptic. The famous "Winter of the Blue Snow" of 1886-87 turned rivers of the American West into glaciers that when they thawed, carried along inundations of dead cattle. Theodore Roosevelt was virtually ruined as a rancher by the weather that destroyed 65% of his herd. In the annus mirabilis of 1811, the Mississippi River flowed northward briefly because of the New Madrid earthquake...
...have is weather as electronic American Shintoism, a casual but almost mystic daily religion wherein nature is not inert but restless, stirring, alive with kinetic fronts and meanings and turbulent expectations (forecasts, variables, prophecies). We have installed an elaborate priesthood and technology of interpretation: acolytes and satellites preside over snow and circuses. At least major snowstorms have about them an innocence and moral neutrality that is more refreshing than the last national television spectacle, the O.J. Simpson trial...
...apolitical. The weather in its mirabilis mode can, of course, be dragged onto the op-ed page to start a macro-argument about global warming or a micro-spat over a mayor's fecklessness in deploying snowplows. Otherwise, traumas of weather do not admit of political interpretation. The snow Shinto reintroduces an element of what is almost charmingly uncontrollable in life. And, as shown last week, surprising, even as the priests predict it. This is welcome--a kind of ideological relief--in a rather stupidly politicized society living under the delusion that everything in life (and death) is arguable, political...