What happens when nature unleashes its fury in the form of a blizzard of historic magnitude and buries one’s city, in this case Washington, in well over two feet of snow?
We’re talking here about a winter storm that last weekend hit not only the American capital, but virtually all cities across the mid-Atlantic shore, a monster storm that meteorologists had warned would be, and indeed became, “one for the ages.” Various media outlets dubbed it “snowzilla,” a nickname it deservedly earned, for its arrival meant that, where it hit, all airports were shut down. All roads were closed. All streets were deserted. All public transportation halted. All schools ceased teaching, all businesses ceased trading and, to a large extent, all government agencies ceased functioning.
So how do you, a simple mortal, respond to all this? Simple answer: You adopt the posture of a coward, not a warrior. You hunker down. You wait for the elements to come to their senses. And you watch the storm from a window inside your home, where you had better stay put for the duration if you value life and limb. You stay there also to watch the beauty and poetry of falling snow, nature’s way of leaving you its calling card, reminding you that perhaps from time to time its good for the soul to retreat into the comfort of your centrally-heated living room and engage in a bit of self-address.
Or retreat there to catch up on your reading, or reconsider watching Godfather III, which may not be as bad, after all, as you had thought when you first saw it the first time around. Or, heck, watch the Australian Open or even play Scrabble with your smart-alecky daughter, always ready with that seven-letter word. There is, at any rate, no going out. Not even for sledding, snowboarding or even shoveling. This storm is a horse of a different color.
Snowstorms are no joke. They can be lethal, leaving great devastation behind. Though countries in the Euro-American world today have the technological know-how to minimize the impact of that devastation, lesser prepared ones can feel the brunt of blizzards in many tragic ways. The 1972 Iran Blizzard, for example, one of the deadliest in recorded history, caused approximately 4,000 deaths. It dropped 26 feet of snow and completely buried 200 villages after a snowfall lasting nearly a week.
Yet, watching snowfall, one can’t help but think, is an inspiring spectacle, imbued with a kind of beauty and poetry all its own. Look at those snow flakes, each unique, in its own intricate patterns — for no two flakes are ever identical — each independent in its sense of self, as it were, sparkling outside your window like a whole lot of zooming comets, landing on every leaf, every blade, every twig, every branch of every tree in your backyard, and across the street, each reflecting the radiance of that uniqueness.
J.B. Priestly, the British author, who died in 1984, once reflected on that phenomenon by writing: “The first fall of snow is not only an event. It is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment, where is it to be found?”
One wonders how a person who has never seen snow would react to watching its splendor for the first time. Duke Kahanamoko, the native Hawaiian swimmer, credited with popularizing the ancient Hawaiian sport of surfing, once retorted, when asked by a reporter if he had ever seen snow, by saying: “I have never seen snow, and do not know what winter means ... Out of the water, I’m nothing.”
But, ha! Perhaps he can “imagine” snow, much in the manner that a man, born blind, can evoke an image of the “things” in his objective world — though clearly not their color or their place in perspective. And Duke, some of the water you love so much could travel from your neck of the woods in Hawaii, to fall from the sky, unbidden, as it did last week-end, on us in the eastern third of the nation, in the form of a blizzard, paralyzing our habits, yes, but also enchanting our souls.
And, yes, I did catch up on my reading, when I finally picked up off my bookshelf that iconic work, Arabian Sands — what other book to read on a stormy night? — by the explorer and travel writer, Wilfred Thesiger, about his journey across the Empty Quarter, in the late 1940s, where, on his way to study the lives of Bedouins, he encountered many a desert storm, which rivaled in both unbridled fury and poetic majesty, many a snowstorm.
Just as we speak of an object being as “pure as driven snow,” surely we also speak of it being as “whole as a grain of sand.” God has created a wondrous world for us to contemplate, has He not?
