Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 21, 1993 TAG: 9303220384
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: B-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALAN SORENSEN EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
NATURE'S SNOW BALANCE
Blizzards, though dangerous, can be good for the soul.You see, I like snow. My wife and kids do, too.
Before last weekend's storm, almost every time the weather came up, it seems, someone would assure me that recent winters have been atypical.
Usually we get more snow than this, they'd say. I remember school-closings that went on and on, they'd say. At which point the talk might turn to global warming or other possible explanations.
And I'd think to myself: Thanks a lot. I have passed only two winters here, so the seasons have been like the children in radio host Garrison Keillor's storied hometown: "all above average." Or, in the case of Roanoke-area snow, below average.
Until last weekend.
It was as if, by sending this surplus of stuff after a couple of (I'm told) extraordinarily lean years, nature was restoring the balance with a vengeance.
Delivered by a beast, dumped inconveniently all at once, a couple of feet of snow hardly compensated for two years' near-absence of sledding and snowman-building and snowball-throwing.
But neither was the Blizzard of '93 an unmitigated disaster.
I'm not belittling the deaths or damage it wreaked. There is tragedy all around.
But for those who didn't suffer heart attacks shoveling their drives or require rescue from remote regions or face other snowy calamities, the blizzard at least disrupted routine. We coped. And that can be, in small ways, redemptive.
How often do we peer out frosted windows to view a vast, silent, moving screen shutting out the sky? How many of us had our pulses quicken, or exercised with shovels in the brisk air, or saw the best brought out in someone last week?
The Blizzard (maybe) of the Century sure offered something to talk about.
Nearly everyone I talked to had a minor hardship or at least an inconvenience to overcome, a story to tell, a memory to share. Something out of the ordinary.
This can be bracing, because routines and the artifices that support them tend to obscure basic conditions of our existence - the struggle for survival in an impersonal universe, and all that.
No one I know had to struggle to survive the storm. I've read accounts of some who did, such as the campers in the Great Smoky Mountains, as well as stories about those who lost struggles.
But for most of us, the storm offered a small reminder, fortunately not a life-threatening one, of life's precariousness.
Our children like to play a game called "Oregon Trail," sitting in the comfort of a chair before a bright computer screen. They follow the pioneers' trail west, facing simulated hardships along the way, sometimes succumbing to them.
As they braved high winds and snow to venture outside last weekend, their appreciation of the game may have deepened.
In my case, I tried to drive out before the driveway became impassable, only to discover it already was impassable. I had to abandon the family car in a snowdrift.
Granted, I faced perhaps as great a danger reporting this news to my wife as I had spinning wheels on a hillside. But making the attempt provided a small simulation, anyway, of risk and uncertainty in a contest with the elements.
After I'd failed, I walked back from the snowbound car, slowly through the swirling white, rehearsing my explanation, but also thrilled by the blotting out of everything but my breathing and the clean, furious snow. I was, as Emerson put it, "enclosed in a tumultuous privacy of storm."
For some people, I understand, Charles Darwin's theory of "survival of the fittest" remains controversial, perhaps on the assumption it's at odds with religious experience. But the struggle for existence hardly shuts out awe or wonder or majesty.
With the help of a friendly plow driver and his technology, I eventually won my minor struggle with the snow. On Sunday we dug out, with our kids Laura, Lucy and Nell, a hole in the side of a snowbank large enough for us to sit inside awhile and pretend it was a hotel with strange amenities.
Meantime, the drama outdoors had evoked a sense of vivid immediacy and mild exhiliration, as one can experience sometimes walking through a woods.
Something else about survival, which hits during storms: It's a social phenomenon. We depend on one another. We realize this in moments of adversity.
A colleague at the newspaper reports that a neighbor last weekend helped her dig out of her driveway, after which she drank coffee in his kitchen. It was the first time she'd visited her neighbors in their home. This story and ones like it were repeated, I'm sure, everywhere the blizzard spread.
Routines reinforce not only our sense of safety, but also our self-absorption. We rarely stop to consider nature's true regard for us - its cosmic shrug.
A routine-disrupting storm can help remind us, thus, of our minor significance where the universe is concerned. Weather delivers blows and beauty indiscriminately, on innocents and sinners alike.
In my case, the howling wind crumpled and rolled up a good part of our home's tin roof as if it were the top of a sardine can. No regard was shown for the merits of the family huddled inside, our reverence for nature or our appreciation of snow.
In 1755, an earthquake in Lisbon killed thousands, including women and children, rich and poor. The church made the mistake of suggesting that the disaster was an act of divine retribution, an explanation that most citizens found ridiculous.
My wife was not disposed to accept my driving into the snowbank as an entirely natural event, arbitrary and beyond human influence or culpability. (She had earlier suggested that I check out the driveway first on foot.) But we both have accepted the shorn roof as a fact to live with awhile.
Granted, it was no crisis, given the prompt and courteous attentions of roofers and insurance adjusters. I have to admit it's nice to confront a storm sheltered by civilization's conveniences and comforts.
But was our shelter entirely earned? Or did chance and luck, more than anything we have done in our lives, put us in this heated home and provide the means to arrange its repairs?
Under normal circumstances, we rarely ask such questions. In this age, too often there is more whining than gratitude.
A final point. A blizzard, like nature, may not recognize or spare virtue; even so, people during storms often act impressively, sometimes heroically.
At our newspaper and I'm sure many other businesses, many employees went to extraordinary lengths to get their jobs, at times other people's jobs, done. I'll bet as many Virginians committed small acts of selfless generosity during the blizzard as during all the preceding weeks of 1993.
A poet once wrote: "Which is the way? I ask, and turn to go/As a man turns to face oncoming snow."
Only to find spring arrived.