A Hazy Shade of Winter

"Look around. Leaves are brown. There's a patch of snow on the ground."

Or not.

You're gonna hate me for this, but please take a look at the photo to the left. You know what that is? That's right. It's snow. Or, more accurately, a car covered by more than a foot of the fluffy white stuff. That's what Chicago looked like last winter. (This picture was taken on Christmas Day 2000.) And that's how it's supposed to look. Yep. Congested streets. Sidewalks with only a six-inch-wide path to get by on. Cars that don't move again until May. That's how it's supposed to look.

Not this season.

It's sad when Atlanta--which rarely, if ever, gets snow and freaks out to the Nth when it does--has had more now than Chicago. Yet, here it is, the winter of 2002, and Atlanta has four inches to our paltry two. And that one didn't come all in one day, either. No, it too several small snows, the largest coming right before Christmas to add just that touch of seasonal decoration, to make up that one. So while my relatives in Georgia and Alabama are slipping and sliding and wondering what in the blue fuck is happening, I see naught but gray skies and grass that can't decide whether it should be alive or dead.

Please don't think that I'm wishing a blizzard on our fair city. I've seen what major snowstorms can do. I was alive for the Blizzard of '67, the one our fathers and grandfathers always spoke of as "the big one." I was a freshman at Lane Tech when the Blizzard of '79 closed the public schools for a week and left the city buried in six-foot-high snowdrifts for weeks.

I was a senior going to night school (because I was a lousy student in my freshman and sophomore years) when a rare April snowstorm dropped eight inches on the city. That night, I walked from a friend's apartment to Gordon Tech, where I took drafting classes in an effort to graduate on time. The snow was already a few inches deep, and lacerating winds made crossing the Lane Tech parking lot downright painful.

Once I made it behind the enormous school, though, I found the most peaceful scene I've ever witnessed: shielded from the swirling breezes by both the school and the football stadium, I was able to walk down the driveway as snow fell gently and quietly down, the rest of the world a mere snow-hazed afterthought. Unfortunately, this peace could not last. I had to emerge from the driveway on Addison Street and struggle across the river bridge, only to find that many students couldn't make it to class that night and the teacher, unable to get home to retrieve his questions for our final exam, had to make the questions up off the top of his head, practically guaranteeing that everyone who was able to make it would pass easily. (I know I did.)

And it's those memories of that storm in '82 that concern me most. Chicago rarely gets through a winter without at least one big snow. In the last couple of winters, the big snows were out of the way early, leaving us the rest of the winter season to recover. I worry that this year we'll get whacked when we least expect it (and are thus least prepared for it). I worry that we'll be lulled into a false sense of security by the mild, dry January and will get clobbered by a storm that might otherwise inspire yawns.

Am I inviting the wrath of the weather gods--or, at least, encouraging them to hit the snooze alarm--by bringing all of this up? Maybe so. As I write this, our intrepid local weather forecasters are predicting snow for tomorrow. Nothing major--possibly one to three inches. But such a snowfall would keep the record for the latest one-inch snowfall (January 17) right where it belongs. And such a snowfall might keep the aforementioned weather gods from crashing down on us all at once.

But I'm not betting on it.