At Home by Ourselves, the Day Being Dreadfully Bad

By the time you read this, the great snow event of 2010 — the “Snowpocalypse,” “Snowmaggedon,” “Snowbama,” “Snowtorious B.I.G.,” etc., and the blizzard that followed three days later — will be fading from memory.

This column won’t see the light of day for a week after I’ve written it. That’s the way it is with deadlines for a weekly newspaper. Especially when you’re trying to turn in a column early, in case an ice-caked branch takes out your power line.

But right now, today, in Baltimore, the day after a so-called “100 year blizzard,” and three days after the single greatest snowstorm in the history of the state of Maryland, I have to tell you that it feels monumental indeed.

It started on Friday, February 5^th. Schools closed that day. The federal government closed early, too. Which is how the three Olshans found ourselves hunkered down as the snow began in earnest on Friday evening.

The nor’easter bore down on us that night. As the gale howled, playing havoc with the brittle hundred foot pine tree next to our house, we heard something strange and new: thunder. Rare snow lightning lit the sky like a welder’s torch. Monster icicles glowed electric blue.

It snowed all night and all the next day. By the time the storm cleared out Saturday evening, the city was nearly silent, stunned by the record totals. Emergency routes were practically impassable. We knew this because we live along one. By dint of a mighty, round-the-clock effort, a single lane on select highways had been kept clear, only to be turned into icy parking lots by pile-ups and jackknifed tractor-trailors.

The governor appeared on television in what looked like workout clothes, always a sign of major catastrophe. When your public officials work so hard to look like they’re, well, working so hard, you know the situation’s bad. Stay at home, the governor told us.

As if there were anywhere to go!

Then, just three days later, another monster storm came barreling in from the west. This one brought with it the kind of low pressure usually reserved for hurricanes, along with winds to match. Not to mention an additional twenty inches of snow.

Just when we’d dug ourselves out of the last one.

We were well prepared for both storms. The first storm had been forecast as potential record-breaker as early as the Wednesday before it hit. There was plenty of time to gas up the car and lay in essential supplies. Even some non-essential supplies. This was Super Bowl weekend, after all.

In fact, that excellent forecast was perhaps the single greatest story of the Snowpocalypse. Long-range weather forecasting is still fairly primitive. That’s not a knock on meteorologists, merely a statement of the complexity of the problem.

Despite all of the supercomputing power that the United States government throws at Mother Nature, in the form of the National Weather Service, any forecast more than three days out is still largely a matter of voodoo. Well, maybe not voodoo. More like second-guessing how far the actual weather is likely to deviate from incredibly complex mathematical models.

The earth’s atmosphere, believe it or not, is a kind of fluid. Weather prediction is a study of fluid dynamics. Unfortunately for those of us living at the bottom of the jar, fluids are inherently chaotic. Meaning, no matter how amazing your mathematical model may be, it’s doomed to be an approximation, not an actual solution. An educated guess, in other words, but nevertheless, still a guess.

Still, my hat’s off to the National Weather Service (NWS) for doing as good a job as they do. I think it’s worth pointing out, for all you government-haters out there, that the NWS is a branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Which is, in turn, a branch of — drum roll, please — the United States Department of Commerce!

The NWS called the Snowpocalypse. And man, were they ever right. It was the biggest snowstorm in the state’s recorded history.

Note the phrase “recorded history.”

About a century before the United States started keeping official weather records, all the way back in January of 1772, there was probably an even bigger snowstorm. A full three-footer, compared with 2010’s measly two-and-a-half footer.

How do we know this? Because George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both recorded it, Jefferson in his garden diary, and Washington in his compulsive daily account of the weather.

Thanks to Mount Vernon’s excellent website (www.mountvernon.org), we’re able to read Washington’s own notes on the storm. Here’s what he wrote in his diary:

[January 26, 1772] At home all day alone, that is with the Family.

27 At home by ourselves, the day being dreadfully bad.

28 Just such a day as the former & at home alone.

29 With much difficulty rid [sic] as far as the Mill, the Snow being up to the breast of a Tall Horse everywhere.

So the Father of Our Nation spent his “snowstorm of the century” hunkered down in the bosom of his family — just like us!

Over the past week, I could have written those very words in my own diary.

Except for the part about the horse.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 18 Feb 2010
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com