AT
LARGE
Real Weather
March 10, 2005
By
Doug Cabral
Everything changes, of course, including the old neighborhood. You
remember it as it was, then you visit after an absence of years,
and the huge houses and long blocks, lively and unchanged in memory,
turn out to be small and short. And, nothing going on.
The lawns you mowed for summer spending money, so vast at the time,
would be the work of a minute or two for the grownup you, with or
without a ride-on. The mile and a half hike to school is, surprise,
a trifling couple of hundred yards through a neighborhood of pygmy
dwellings that are all the wrong colors and surrounded by chain
link fences that never were. Nothing performs in reality the way
memory leads us to expect. That's disappointing, of course.
Memories of weather past can be more satisfying. Weather memories
stand later scrutiny better than neighborhoods. We believe weather
was worse years ago, and we are comforted by the thought. We also
believe that we were all tougher, and there is some satisfaction
in the contemplation of that. As the television weather people inflated
their coverage of the blow overnight Tuesday into yesterday, or
the one they are so excited about for the weekend - call it Storm
Force or Winter Blast coverage, you choose - one was inclined to
say, with some justification based upon meteorological records,
that this is nothing.
You want to talk about weather, I'll tell you about weather. And,
it will probably be the case that years from now, especially if
the global warming computer models turn out to be correct, that
our children will be stealing our lines and talking about their
winters as true humdingers - snowier and colder, or warmer and wetter,
than ever before. It's a parent trap, I guess.
“The storm paralyzed and isolated every city and town from
Washington, D.C., north through New England and west through central
Pennsylvania and New York for up to a week. Nearly all commerce
and industry, including Wall Street, came to a halt … The one
blessing about this storm was that it came late in the season. The
temperature didn't stay below freezing very long, and the snow melted
rather quickly, without causing widespread serious flooding. In
all, it could have been a much worse disaster and hardship.”
The blizzard “dumped 30 to 50 inches of snow over a widespread
area of the Northeast with winds of 40 to 70 mph on land and up
to 90 mph at sea.”
This was not the December 26 northeaster of 2004, or the March 8-9
wild child that knocked out power in Chilmark for a couple of hours.
It was the Great Storm of March 11-14, 1888. The writer is Judd
Caplovich in a book called “Blizzard,” published in 1987.
Never mind this week's TV anchor references to 100-year storms and
comparisons to the blizzard of 1978, Caplovich called the 1888 storm
a “500-year event” with “no peer in sheer force and
destructiveness.”
In a weak moment Tuesday night, when I was mortally impressed by
Storm Force's live coverage from some snow pile on the Jamaicaway,
I thought to roust The Times' reporters from their beds and send
them out to stand in the road or on the beach to record their impressions
of the weather. Had I called, of course they would all have said
no. Newspaper reporters are not television reporters, and thanks
for that.
Anyway, the proposition that weather was worse years ago and wimpier
now finds some quantitative support. That 500-year blizzard of March
1888 sported a barometric nadir or 28.92 inches of mercury recorded
at Woods Hole. That's mighty low. Tuesday, the pressure got down
to 29, which is also low and not much higher than in 1888, but still
higher. The wind in 1888 blew as hard as 70 miles per hour. Tuesday,
the hardest recorded gust was 43 miles per hour, a breeze really.
So, memory may be imperfect, but apparently not so far as weather
is concerned. Maybe it was indeed harsher years ago, and maybe folks
were hardier. And, maybe it will be harsher still in the years ahead.
But, all the TV hyper-coverage is obviously just bad-weather envy.
How sad is that?
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