It’s the middle of the night as I write this – 3 a.m., early Monday – and normally I’d be fast asleep, ready to crawl out of bed in a few hours to drive my wife to work, take the kids to school, and greet the workday. But not tonight. Not right now, or here, in northern New Jersey. Old Man Winter came a-callin’ (again) to the northeastern United States, promising more than a foot of snow, plummeting temperatures, and wind gusts up to 40 miles per hour. So….
….there’ll be no school during the day ahead, and no commuter trains into the city, and no reason for me to crawl out of bed until I’m good and damn ready. Naturally, I ignored the clock and did as I pleased.
I stayed up late binging on the last few episodes of The Beast in Me, a cracking good psych/murder thriller on Netflix. I read a while. I stepped outside into a world gone silent.
There’s a certain calm to being up at 3 a.m. on a wintry night. You step out onto the front porch and it’s just you and the snow and the biting cold. Everyone else is fast asleep, at least in this neck of the woods. You feel like you’re the only person on earth. I could step out into the yard and build a snowman and sit down and carry on a conversation with it, out loud, and nobody would know.
But, of course, I didn’t.
My plan is to sleep late, free of the alarm clock. Whether I actually do sleep late depends on the other alarm clock – my internal one – which usually rattles me out of bed early regardless of my own personal instructions for it to take the GD morning off. I might get four hours of sleep if I’m lucky. But that’s not a problem. When you hit a certain age, and a certain point in your career (still working, but by your own schedule), you don’t tend to worry a lot about sleep.
I guess these weather conditions constitute a blizzard, maybe even a “powerful nor’easter” that could intensify into a “bomb cyclone.” Those are terms used in the weather reports I’ve looked at every hour on the hour. I’d never before heard the term “bomb cyclone.” It sounds like a late-’70s punk band.
I am sick of the snow, by the way. I’ve been sick of it for weeks now. Months now. It started snowing here in mid-December and has rarely taken a break since then. The snow from our last major blizzard – which happened about a month ago, bringing 15 inches of snow and sub-zero temperatures – had almost melted away before this latest one hit.
In not too terribly long I’ll spend part of the daylight hours shoveling this white powdery crap off of our sidewalk and walkways. It’s not a chore I take much joy in. I’d rather just let nature run its course through the magic of sunlight and rising temperatures. Snow eventually melts. Let it melt, say I.
But:
The local municipal authorities fine you if you don’t at least shovel the sidewalk in front of your house. I learned this the hard way our first winter here, two years ago. So, I’ll shovel just enough to avoid the wrath of the powers that be. The rest we’ll get to later.
*****
It is now Tuesday morning, 10 a.m. – about 31 hours after I started this blog in the wee hours of early Monday.
While writing the first part of the blog, I accidentally hit some laptop key that suddenly made my Word document go all batshit on me. The text got lighter. These page break lines showed up, and some random “header” and “closer” thingys. I lost the ability to edit the text. This happens occasionally, when a finger hits a stray key. It took me 15 minutes to resolve the damn thing, while the clock was ticking toward 4 a.m. After that, I gave up the will to keep writing…..
The snow didn’t give up the will to keep snowing, though. We ended up with at least two feet of it. Seriously: Two. Freaking. Feet.
Here, take a gander…
As you can see, there was some serious shoveling going on. And more shoveling after I took that photo. And more later. And more and more and more.
For the life of me, I cannot understand how people spend decades buried in this shit every winter. But, they do. In fact, they seem to thrive in it. Some of my neighbors – Jersey natives who were born, raised and likely to die here – take great pleasure in clearing the snow away. They hop out of bed in the morning, grab their shovels and snow blowers, and make a merry day of it.
But even they seem surprised by the series of storms we’ve seen lately. I asked them, and they said this is not normal. This is not New Jersey weather. It’s Eskimo weather. There has been a constant onslaught of snow and frigid temps and high winds since before Christmas. It’s insane.
I’m a southern boy, born and raised in North Carolina, with stops in Alabama and South Carolina as a young adult. Warmth, sunshine and staggering humidity are baked into my bones.
But I’ve also spent quite a bit of time in the Northeast. I spent more than half of the 2000s living in Connecticut, New Jersey and New York City. Was it cold back then? Yes. Did it snow? Yes.
But I don’t remember anything like we’ve seen in NJ since moving here from London 2.5 years ago. The winters have been extreme and endless, much more than before. I chalk it up to climate change, for want of anything else to blame. I don’t think it’s an outlier. I think we are living in the new normal.
Lately, I’ve been tuning in to the Australian Open Tennis Championships, which ended a couple weeks ago, but which I recorded so I could take my sweet-ass time watching it. It’s late summer down there. The commentators kept mentioning the stifling hot weather Down Under – temps as high as 110 F (43 C).
Meanwhile, I was watching part of it while the weather here was around -20 F.
*****
Out of curiosity, I decided to check the weather in other parts of the world. Right now, at 11:10 am ET on Tuesday, here’s what’s happening:
- Lagos: Partly sunny, 86 degrees F
- Budapest: Sunny, 50 F
- Islamabad: Fair skies, 66 F
- Mexico City: Fair skies, 53 F
- Oslo: Partly cloudy, 32 F
- Sydney: Clear, 73 F
- Tokyo: Cloudy, 55 F
- Moscow: Heavy snow, 24 F
- Cape Town: Fair skies, 72 F
- Santiago: Fair skies, 80 F
- Tehran: Mostly cloudy, 62 F
- Montreal: Partly cloudy, 12 F
- Honolulu: Showers, 68 F
- South Pole: Sunny and windy, -51 F
That’s a whole lot of weather extremes in a single day. But at a cursory glance, it still seems pretty moderate around much of the world. Conditions could be completely different tomorrow. I’d love to know what they’ll be 50 years from now, but I won’t be around unless somebody discovers a miracle life-extender drug.
I have grown less adaptable to weather shifts as I age. I’d love every day to be around 72 F, with a slight breeze, and sunny skies. But the weather doesn’t care what I want, or you want, or anybody else wants. It does what it does, and has since the dawn of our planet, and will until our planet burns into ashes.
Oddly, I find a certain comfort in that. Our planet plays by its own rules. It doesn’t care what we silly humans think. Humans are no better or worse than the birds in the sky or the fish in the sea or the mighty Redwood roots growing underground (okay, maybe we’re worse).
The weather will do what it pleases. Earth will do what it pleases. If we get out of line, which we do – a lot – it will punish us. If we do what we’re supposed to do, maybe we’ll come out okay.
Either way, the weather will keep dancing to its own rhythm. If (when) we all vanish into the mist, the Earth will not note our passing in any way, shape or form.
And I’m just fine with that.
Image: Monday morning, 3 a.m.
Vance Cariaga 