Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

Buy milk! Buy bread!

There was a traffic jam in the shopping center parking lot next to my house tonight, because (can you believe it? In December?) we are under a winter storm watch.

Crap.

Actually, I don't blame people at all for stopping to get stuff tonight, because if we really do get the "wintry mix" of freezing rain, sleet, and snow over the next four days, going out is going to be nasty.

(Mostly I'm irked because this forecast doesn't bode well for my participation is Saturday's Jingle Bell 5K.)

And I am not going to complain about how Washingtonians go crazy when the weather is bad...

I hear that a lot. In fact, I heard that back when I was living Down South, from a coworker named Charlie who'd grown up in Mobile, Alabama. Charlie was a retired commander, so he'd had his O-4 lobotomy. Before retiring and returning to the beloved Deep South he'd been stationed at the Pentagon. One winter when it snowed during the day it had apparently taken him two hours to travel home, a trip that usually took twenty minutes.

It took more than two hours for him to tell me about how Washingtonians can't drive in snow and how the whole city was just insane where weather is concerned.

While he ranted I remembered a co-worker I'd had here, Mary from Buffalo. Mary drove a Bronco, but the family also had another 4x4, with big snow tires and a plow attachment, that they called their "winter rat." (This was back in the day, kids, when SUVs were not common everyday cars.) Mary couldn't figure out why we closed schools when we only had six inches of snow.

By the time Charlie was done I had it figured out. "Before you were stationed at the Pentagon," I asked him, "How many times had you seen snow?"

He'd seen it a couple of times, he said.

And how many times had he driven in snow, I asked. (We worked for a lawyer. We could cross-examine.)

He admitted that the first time he'd driven in snow he was in D.C.

Then I told him about Mary. Then I concluded, and I still believe this firmly, that the problem with Washington and snow is not Washingtonians, it's the incompatibility between the southerners who've never seen snow and the northerners who think that for anything less that three feet it isn't worth slowing down. If everyone who hasn't lived here since they learned to drive at 16 stayed off the road in bad weather, we'd be just fine.

Posted by Nic at December 3, 2003 08:35 PM | TrackBack