Word: snows
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...blizzard of 1996 was at its peak on January 13. There were 36 inches of wet packing snow on the ground, four-foot-long icicles dangling from the eaves and a brigh? orange glow at night from the reflection of street lamps on the snow. Two Cabot House seniors with vision trudged into the middle of the Quad with buckets and pails, a few sketches and a penchant for frostbite...
...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...
...SNOW, LET IT SNOW...