SNOWY DAYS AND OTHER CRISES

As an Indiana University sophomore, it didn’t make sense to come home to New Jersey for Thanksgiving. The trip took too much time and cost too much money and exams ended by December 15.

By that age, I had done some hitch-hiking. So I convinced my friends, Ellis and Larry, who hadn’t, that we should hitch-hike to Notre Dame, where several of Ellis’s high school mates were enrolled.

We had Thanksgiving dinner and then slept at Larry’s Indianapolis house. On the raw, windy, snowy Friday morning after, Larry’s sister dropped us off alongside the highway that led north to South Bend.

When a half hour had passed, an early model SUV stopped on the road’s shoulder and gave us refuge. The burly, bundled-up, amiable vehicle operator, who wore a baseball hat with some automotive logo, had his equally insulated wife and young son aboard. He told us he was on Jerry Sneva’s Indy 500 pit crew. Despite the weather and his full vehicle, our benefactor exhibited a race car driver’s lead foot. Given his line of work, he might have thought he was proceeding at a sensible speed. But when you hitch-hike, especially with two companions, you’re grateful to anyone who picks you up.

We talked as we headed through the squall for about twenty minutes. Suddenly reacting to something in front of us, the driver braked hard. We skidded a long way on the icy road and narrowly missed colliding with an oncoming truck.

Several hours later, we got to South Bend and, from there, to the Notre Dame campus. We were greeted there by Ellis’s Queens, NYC buddy/neighbor, John Lydon. Other than his Northern European complexion and slim build, this John Lydon bore little resemblance to his punk rock namesake. Our John Lydon wasn’t Rotten at all. He was chill, cerebral and even a little funny.

That evening and night, the snow continued in earnest. The snowbound campus was beautiful. John showed us The Grotto, a wide, stacked boulder wall within a clearing surrounded by trees. The wall had a cozy stone alcove that sheltered hundreds of lighted vigil candles. As heavy snow fell on the clearing and the trees’ already snow-bent branches, we paused silently.

The snowy, candlelit, night-time Grotto was the most soothing, numinous setting I had ever been in. Inspired, I imagined spending the rest of the night doing Gregorian chants—though I knew very little Latin, I thought I might spontaneously start singing in tongues—or stay up all night composing haiku.

But John suggested that we could go to a tiny, old, dimly lit, rundown gym at the edge of campus and play basketball. So we did that instead. Through a missing window, we could see the snow falling in the dark; some flakes blew onto the edges of this dim, barnlike space. Though we could see our breath the whole time, our motion kept us warm enough.

We slept on the floor of John’s ancient, austere, all-white, poster-free, Sorin Hall dorm room, with its narrow floor plan and high ceiling and pot of water on his cast-iron radiator to moisten the air. In the morning, we gazed out his window at a small lake that contrasted with the otherwise snow-driven, building-less landscape. A hobbit hole says comfort. The view from John’s window said serenity.

It snowed a few more inches on Saturday afternoon. Indoors, though, Notre Dame on Thanksgiving weekend was warm and lively. We met many students, most of whom came from distant states. It didn’t make sense for them to go home, either. The dining hall was packed at each meal; nearly all diners were males. We saw basketball and football guys we had heard of or seen on TV: Bill Laimbeer, Kelly Tripucka and Bill Hanzlik. We briefly met the basketball coach, Digger Phelps. He struck me as a good dude, in a first impression sort of way. I wondered if that morning he had shoveled his own driveway.

On Sunday afternoon, we bid John farewell and trudged a long stretch through more falling snow to the main road nearest the campus. We crossed that road and began to seek a ride south to Indianapolis. As we waited, we were freezing. The remaining light was fading from a gray sky.

An hour-plus later, a police car stopped. The officer rolled down his window and asked us what we thought we were doing, trying to hitch-hike in that kind of weather. We had no good answer. He took us to the South Bend Greyhound Station, from which we caught a bus lumbering and sometimes sliding through a white-out to Indianapolis and then to Bloomington. We must have gotten back very late. I don’t remember arriving.

Decades later, in response to my email alluding to that trip, Ellis replied: “When I think of that experience, I feel lucky to be alive. We could easily have died--all of us.”

I wasn’t sure if he was referencing the trip north or the trip south. He may have been right about either leg. I don’t think Ellis or Larry ever hitch-hiked again. I often did, but typically alone. And only in warm weather.

College dorm posters remind us that life is a journey, not a destination. That weekend, we enjoyed the destination but not the journey. Unlike the lockdowners/vaxxers, I won’t try to argue that “We couldn’t have known” that hitch-hiking in a blizzard would become a cold mess.

I’ve had, and initiated, other wintry adventures and misadventures. I usually like being out in the snow; it’s pretty and invigorating. As with life generally, if you don’t hide from the world, stuff happens. Far more of what happens will be good than bad. Isolation and inactivity are low-yield life strategies.

—

Over the past three winters, it hasn’t snowed much in New Jersey. But last week, as in much of the US, eight fluffy inches were forecast for the hillier, western parts of my state. As during Coronamania, the media hyped this storm to such an extent that many people believed that the deepest, worst case snow scenario applied to them, even if they lived—as I do—in NJ’s more populous, flatter, less snowy region.

Where most New Jerseyans live, three inches fell.

Unsurprisingly, before this minor storm, our Coronamanic governor declared a State of Emergency. Politicians love drama and theater. Before he came out as a politician, Phil Murphy had been a thespian.

My wife, Ellen, loves to shop for food; to her, it’s recreational. The day before this storm, she went to her favorite place, the “World Class” Shop-Rite grocery store. When she got home, she described the typical pre-snow shopping frenzy. One suspects that these emergency sustenance-seekers must have had some food in the fridge or at least a few cans of tuna, beans and some rice on their shelves to get by on for a day. Nonetheless, they felt compelled to shop, even though the roads had been salted and would all be plowed within four hours of the storm’s end.

Against snowy backdrops, TV’s bundled-up 11 p.m. news reporters excitedly detailed storm statistics; as if light snow were perilous and there was something new to say about it. As during Coronamania, snow reporters told us that officials were “racing against time” to clear the snow before temperatures would “plummet” in the next few days.

And as the TV anchors did during Coronamania, the weatherwoman showed various maps and graphs, this time depicting how many snow-inches various places got. She displayed a color-coded radar map, while sharing her expertise by saying stuff like, “A front came in…it snowed an extra four inches in the hilly, western counties...etc.” Nearly all of the half-hour was devoted to hyping and chronicling the modest accumulation.

TV news, especially the 24-hour variety, is a panic-building machine. Many watch during snowstorms to confirm what they already see outside their windows. As during Coronamania, they trust their TVs more than they trust what they see in their own realm with their own eyes. Seeing TV accounts that it also snowed in other parts of the Metro Area gave them a feeling of being “all in this together.”

I recalled seeing a snow news story a few decades prior in which the reporter visited some fiftyish guy in The Bronx with a freezer full of snowballs from each major storm over the past four decades. Each ball was wrapped in its own Baggie with a label identifying the date of the storm and the amount of snow that fell. Holding random exhibits, he grinned as he said stuff like, “February 8, 1982…yeah, that was a good one: twenty-one inches,” before returning the evidence to its icy vault and reaching for more.

While amusing, the snowball collector story seemed fake. Who would do such a thing? I also wondered how the man’s icy artifacts survived various power failures. I had many more questions about the few Scamdemic TV and radio segments I consumed.

People love contrived excitement and the break in routine that a pseudo-crisis affords. A snowy day provides an excuse to shirk responsibilities, hide from others, binge watch, eat comfort food, drink hot beverages and behold the blanketed stillness. When the lockdowns began, many people looked at this as a two-week snow day. Stop the world, I want to get off.

I knew that the government had put us on a slippery slope and wouldn’t stop at two weeks. Almost no one I knew seemed to care.

—

I think it snowed more when I was a kid. Is the climate warming? I don’t know. I wonder who I might trust to provide reliable data or analysis. Overall, some days are hot, some are cold and most are somewhere in-between. Some days are wet, some are dry. Some days the weather is such that you shouldn’t hitch-hike. But no one hitch-hikes anymore, even on the nice days. People fear each other more than they used to.

People say that global warming manifests more during the winter than in the summer. But this January has been steadily cold. If there were a clear warming trend caused by ever-increasing carbon emissions, would there be exceptions to this trend?

Or does weather just vary from year to year, or within some longer cycle? Perhaps the sun burns slightly hotter in some years than others. Or ocean currents change. Or there’s some other, non-anthropogenic cause.

Humans have been on the Earth a long time. Perhaps, given our growing population and carbon footprint, a warming climate is more likely than is the emergence of a meaningfully “novel” virus. Bear in mind that anyone who mentioned an engineered virus during 2020-21 was summarily dismissed as a kook/conspiracy theorist. Though this week, the CIA conceded that the virus likely leaked from a lab.

In both the climate and microbial contexts, “existential threats” seem overstated. Despite the climate and viral doomsday narratives, population keeps rising. I don’t need to examine statistics or charts to know this. I see multiple, multi-unit housing complexes being built near me. If Covid has been the apocalyptic killer that state and federal officials said it was, someone needs to tell the real estate developers before they waste more time and money building dwellings for dead people.

Above all, if climate change is occurring and it’s carbon-induced, will climate activists will forsake the comfort and mobility made possible by burning fossil fuels? Many climate warriors fly in jets, drive cars long distances and demand air-conditioned spaces. PC universities like my former employer, Rutgers, send their many sports teams—to play sports that no one watches—across the US on planes, even though there are plenty of colleges against whom these athletes could compete within 75 miles; there are 24 million people in the latter radius. If climate change is an existential threat, why not end intercollegiate sports and ramp up intramurals? Many climate warriors also support open borders, which have allowed people from other parts of the world to come to the US and burn more carbon than when they lived in Central America.

Even if US climate activists were willing to shrink their carbon footprint, I doubt that China, India or other nations would sacrificially follow suit.

Climate activists strongly supported Covid lockdown and vaxxes. But if Covid had really been widely lethal, wouldn’t climate activists accept, and have been secretly pleased, that some carbon users would die? Why was it suddenly important to climate activists to save old people, whom they didn’t visit in nursing homes?

Regarding snowfall, global warming, viruses and other topics, much of the news is sensationalized. The government overreacts to these purported crises. But interventions in these, and other, contexts aren’t about eliminating the ostensible problem. Instead, these measures seem designed to scare, and control, the masses. And to derive profits or livelihoods by pretending to save humanity.