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 the train station, 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. Only a few days earlier the weather forecasters were calling for 3-4 inches of snow. So they were only off by, oh, 20 GD inches or so.
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 
Whereas here in the Coachella Valley (Palm Springs area), we’ve had abnormally warm temperatures since November, when we had a 10-day stretch of 90-degree days. December, January and February have seen numerous days in the mid to upper 80s, and starting today, we’ll have highs in the 90s for the rest of the week, possibly reaching 97 on Thursday & Friday. I guess there’s no such thing as “normal” anymore. But seriously, two feet of snow in New Jersey is crazy!
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I lived in SoCal for a few years in the early 2000s. I only made it to Palm Springs once, but I believe that was in the spring or summer. I did take a trip to Death Valley during the winter, though, where we stayed in some old rustic cabin or somesuch. My main memory was that it was really cold there — and the heater stopped working in the middle of the night. The desert can get cold in the winter.
I will take your current Palm Springs weather any old day…. 🙂
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Believe it or not, I’ve never been to Death Valley. I’d love to see it before I die, though with global warming the Coachella Valley seems to be approaching Death Valley heat levels during summer (being further inland and well north of us, Death Valley has colder winters).
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We drove through Death Valley in the Summer of ’99, on a West Coast tour. The air was suffocating as soon as we got out of the bus. Crazy to think that people actually *live* there.
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I’ve always wondered what a “snow day” would be like. Movies and TV always portrayed as a fun day off, but I guess the downside would be clearing that snow away. Climate change probably plays a role, but from our experience down here, I wouldn’t be so quick to call it a new normal. We had our worst drought in a century a while back, and it felt like *that* was our new normal, with predictions not looking good. But then we had years of great rains, and that idea was discarded. Again, in the last two years, the rain has been shy (especially last year, when Winter seemed to end 6 weeks early), and we’re potentially looking at drought panic once more. So, I reckon that while the strange patterns may hold for a few years at a time, and be more extreme than traditional cycles, things do change. We can’t expect weather to be the same as it was when we were growing up or even in the decades of our adult life. Earth is changing, and always will. We only get to be here for a miniscule time of its overall lifetime.
By the way, those “fair skies” down here don’t tell of the humidity, which is really the most uncomfrtable thing about Summer. It hasn’t been super-hot most of the time, but that humidity has been a killer. For me, at least. But it looks like we’re moving into cooler days as Autumn approaches.
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Oh snow days are great when you’re a kid. Even growing up down South we’d occasionally have them, which meant no school and a day of sledding and snowball fights. Brilliant. When our kids were young we had great times doing the same thing, both in North Carolina and London. Even as teens they like snow days because they don’t have to go to school (although I do make them help with the shoveling). When you become an adult, though, it’s mostly one more thing you have to deal with. It’s visually pleasing but a pain in every other way — especially when it keeps coming and coming and coming week after week.
So you have been to Death Valley, I see from above? We went there in the winter, when the temps were very moderate during the day but cold at night. I never went during the summer, but from what I hear the heat is oppressive.
You’re right about the humidity. The weather reports always underplay that, but it makes a huge difference. The American South is probably similar to South Africa in that regard. Sometimes you step outside and you’re sweating within 45 seconds or so.
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“I’d never before heard the term “bomb cyclone.” ”
I have but only in the last few years. As you and I are in roughly the same age ballpark, you might appreciate the observation that I think “bomb cyclone” is a term that either meteorologists kept to themselves until recently or was invented by youngsters to make the weather more hip and “clickable”.
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Well you go me curious, so I did a little googling. It looks like the term has been around informally since the 1940s, but only used by meteorologists, as you suspected. It was “formally introduced to meteorology in a 1980 study by Fred Sanders and John Gyakum, published in the Monthly Weather Review, according to the all-knowing AI. But my guess is meteorologists were mainly the ones who used it until maybe this century, when (as you also suspected) it probably had a certain cool factor that the younger meteorologists just had to embrace.
You learn something new everyday…. 🙂
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