At some point since the last time I dispatched postcards, the international rate increased from 90¢ to 98¢. Friends outside the United States to whom I’d written: please accept my apology if it seems you were left off my list since my last adventure more than a year past. Here’s the gist of what I wrote.
At the Museum of Printing History
Continue Reading →
If American supermarkets are like cathedrals, then the day before an impending catastrophe is like Easter vigil mass – the place is packed and you don’t get to leave for at least two hours. After the wait for ingredients for meatloaf and pasta e fagioli, we hoped the snowpocalypse would live up to the forecast, if only to rationalize our maddening experience at Harris Teeter.
And by Sunday morning, this was the view of Washington from space:
(From NASA via DCist)
Alternately snowmageddon and snowpocalypse, the experience on the ground for the last four days has been imbued with end-of-the-worldness. I’ve narrowed the romantic appeal of the debilitating snowfall to the erasure or essentialization of the known world. Cars are camelback marshmallows, the solid black asphalt streets are an aqueous white. My weekdays have been spent cooking, eating the leftovers, watching The Wire and movies set in D.C. (a past-present-future set of All The President’s Men, Burn After Reading, and Minority Report).
Today, the snow hasn’t been falling so much as it has been blowing, alighting on the meter-deep snow drifts only after coasting on highway-speed winds. It’s the third snow day this week, and tomorrow’s the fourth. The city is on spring break, but it’s February with treacherous weather and very little notice. The fucking meatloaf lasted four days and was fucking amazing, worthy of every expletive. I’m also developing a taste for roasted fucking vegetables – especially carrots and onions. There’s still some soup for lunch tomorrow.
Tomorrow night, we’re scheduled to fly to Houston, but that’s tentative like so much else in this state. But when I fly out, it’ll be the first postcard of the year, and Chinese New Year at that. And there will be no snow.
Christina and I spent part of Saturday moving a bookcase from Alexandria to Arlington in a snowstorm. It was not our plan to move a 6′-×-6′-and-heavy piece of furniture in such weather, but due to some misinterpreted communication with the bookcase’s previous owner, we found ourselves with a truck reservation and a free afternoon. While we spent that afternoon actually moving a bookcase, I’ve been responding to the question of what I did during the snowstorm as learning to move a bookcase in a snowstorm.
The sight of cars spinning their wheels on moderate but icy hills was not uncommon – both Christina’s car and the rented truck were subject to acceleration without movement. Once moving, the pedal that would usually stop a moving car sometimes did not – in these moments, I reached for the parking brake. On the 395, passing maneuvers were rare, the use of hazard lights was frequent, and the flow of traffic on a four-lane freeway stayed consistently below 35 mph with all possible civility.
That civility was hardly limited to paved surfaces. While moving the bookcase into the truck, a neighbor of the seller offered a shovel to clear the bed of snow. The seller himself hoisted the piece into place for the road. We considered taping cut-up garbage bags over it and then decided not to – the air was sufficiently cold that the snow would not turn to water (and the bookcase wouldn’t soak it up) while we were driving.
And so, we made our way to Arlington and (with the better traction attendant to carrying a heavy piece of furniture on the back of a rear-wheel-drive truck) up the hill on Daniel Street to the front of Christina’s building. As we haltingly shoved the bookcase from truck bed to snowbank, one of her neighbors (en route to a party) offered a hand and very quickly the unwieldy piece of furniture was in her bedroom and closely matching the woodgrain of her folding bench seats. He took a beer in thanks and welcomed her to the neighborhood.
On that day when snow covered the lane markers and signposts and other artifacts of traffic law, we were treated to a climatized manifestation of the illustration of a street intersection in England from Jonathan Zittrain’s TED talk on random acts of kindness on the internet. His illustration was to support a point that in the absence of directives and laws, civility prevails (and therefore, Wikipedia maintains a reasonable standard of information quality).
Philosophy and human nature aside, civility indeed prevailed on that afternoon. And however you may disdain precipitation and bitterly cold weather, that civility may not have revealed itself – and we may not have had need of it and therefore a venue to appreciate it – otherwise. It’s part of the reason I love living in a place with a bit of a winter.
And in this weather, I learned how to use a parking brake and hazard lights as part of a driving routine, that wood furniture is better transported in snow than rain, and that strangers can be immeasurably helpful and civil and a default position of ’scared shitless’ towards unknown persons is sometimes untenable.
And on Sunday, I learned to never never walk barefoot in the snow.