Sunday, September 13, 2009
Storm Surge 4: Philly ‘82
We got a nice warm rain today, a Mexican front that carried fat warm drops on humid air. I walked through the rain and let it play over me, luxuriating in it with my dad and my son, three generations together on a walk amid new puddles and fragrances sharpened by the storm. But it was just a little thing, hardly worth recalling. Nothing like this one - my penultimate storm story:
I arrived at college acutely aware of the preconceptions associated with my being an Angeleno. People from LA, and especially the SF valley, had a pretty specific national profile at that time. Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Valley Girls had together generated a popular vision of us that was, to say the least, misinformed. But I knew I didn’t look or talk like a typical Angeleno, and I was entering a world where few of us ever ventured, so I could usually make my first impressions without needing to debunk some popular misconception about surfing in Beverly Hills or going to high school in a mall. People actually thought I was from New England at first. It was nice to be presumed to be from a presumptively rational part of the country. I hoped to live up to that impression, mistaken though it might have been, but my work was cut out for me. I’d have to act like I knew the north-east scene and not reveal how new and different it all felt to me.
I thus survived a glorious autumn, only rarely succumbing to the euphoria of the season - clear high skies, fragrant breezes, lanes lined with trees with their leaves all ablaze in colors I’d thought I could only read about… Autumn was rather more intense than I’d expected it to be, but I retained some vestige of superficial equanimity and kept what I called my “wits” about me. The seasons shifted in their turn; the leaves dropped, the sky got cloudy, and people started breaking out their warm clothes. I played along as if my heavy trench coat was a matter of my own longstanding personal style, and not newly-purchased from the downtown surplus store. I hunkered down with the rest of my schoolmates as days grew short, and we waited for snow.
The first snowfall - my first snowfall - was around six inches deep. I was amazed by its muffled whisper and delighted by its crisp sterility, but in keeping with the weather, I played it cool and neither frolicked nor cavorted in my newly-whitewashed world. The next snowfall was a mere three inches. I acted as if I barely noticed it, even as I registered each crunch of my foot through virgin fall and the extraordinary way the white stuff changed the way everything smelled. By the time it melted to slush and got to be a nuisance, I was pretty well seasoned to the season. Winter had nothing left to daunt this southland boy - except those five months of dreary damp chill. Or so I thought.
Mid-December found everybody preoccupied. I was short of sleep, time and attention, and news of impending snowfall may not have struck me as significant. In this, I was mistaken. Snow started falling at sundown and by the next morning, there was no ignoring the transformation that had occurred: a foot and a half of frozen flakes had come down in a blizzard that stopped the city in its tracks. Drifts had piled up to the height of my chin; landmarks that I knew were there - streets, curbs, benches and railings - had been consumed by the all-pervasive whiteness. The blizzard changed everything - odor, sound, sensation, and even cognition, as my mind, too, seemed storm-struck and fundamentally altered. Like all those cars trapped under their thick blankets of snow, I felt unable to extricate myself and startlingly low on traction. I couldn’t think of what to do with myself, veering out of control from idea to idea and task to task. I was experiencing mental white-out conditions and the only apparent antidote was to rub some snow on it.
This, then, I undertook as expeditiously as possible, by plunging myself head first into the first really serious drift I could find out my front door - much to the amusement of my local colleagues. I leapt, trusting the snow to accept me and protect me, and fell fully and instantly into it. Tall but deceptively insubstantial, it pulled me deep into its heart and cradled me with incongruously warm coldness. The scant bits of skin I had left exposed took an instant freezer-burn and crumbs of snow tumbled down my collar and the back of my pants. Emerging hoary and exhilarated moments later from the bank, I shook my head free of snow like a summer hound shaking off riverwater, howling from the sheer intensity of the sensation. Needless to say, my professed equanimity as regarded east coast weather was by the wayside, and I no longer cared.
Within a few hours the untouched wonderland of snowbound West Philly was already sullied with footprints and ski-tracks. Shortly thereafter the roads got plowed, dozers ripping cold grey veins into my sweet sugar-coated world and burying sidewalks in chaotic snowmass. The magic had broken. In the ensuing days, time’s depredations wrought further foulness upon my wonderland. Slush went grey, brown and black; garbage fell and was trapped where it dropped; quadrupeds defecated indiscriminately. A thaw and freeze turned windblown drifts into semi-permanent collections of sharp edges and cruel voids; sidewalks grew dangerously icy.
Eventually it all disappeared; nothing was left of the blizzard of ‘82 but my memory of it. But in defiance of the cycle of seasonal thaws and freezes, those exalted memories remain with me as crisp and pure as a five-foot drift of new-fallen snow on hundred-year-old brick. What’s more, I seem to have all the traction I need to navigate them. Some days when the blizzard of paper at my desk and the coldness of life seem too much to take, I still think back on that big snowstorm, partake again of it, and emerge from recollected snowbanks sufficiently refreshed to persevere.
