four of us piled one on top of the other in defiance of physical laws, teetering, elbows digging into backs, gathering just enough momentum for the cartoon spill. We rode on a golf course near our home, down a glorious hillside hooded with oaks and maples, deep into a valley with steep sides and one slope gentle enough to climb back up for another plunge. We rode this way into the afternoon, into the late shade of a complicated winter sky. The northern Ohio sky is perpetually overcast in wintertime, but the acclimated natives could pass a blind-test between the early dusk and the sunless midafternoon, just as a Las Vegas lounge lizard inside a casino can sense the difference between 3:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. This was different, though. The sky had darkened in a way weâd never before seen, as if its humors were out of balance, blackening it with blood or bile.
Three days in, and the blizzard had only worsened. We were lucky; we had power and heat. Even so, we were isolated. Schools were closed, with no clue to when they might reopen. Most people couldnât go anywhere. Many were stranded wherever they had been when the storm hit. Those who did go out often had to turn back. It was hard to understand anymore whether this was an adventure.
Nature will always provide the best metaphors, and here amid the chaos, with the barometer lower than it had ever before been, was a strange coherence. Two weeks before this historic storm, Goodyear announced it was closing its main Akron factory. Nearly fourteen hundred people would be put out of work. A month later, Firestone would announce it was closing its big Akron plant, eliminating twelve hundred jobs. That year, 1978, four thousand people would lose their jobs in a city defined more than anything else by its work.
But as children, we didnât understand all that any more than we understood the barometer. What we understood was the velocity of steel and plastic on ass-groomed ice, caterwauling down the hills, cutting hard into turns and skidding, sideways stops, imagining ourselves at Innsbruck: Dorothy Hamill; Franz Klammer; Rosi Mittermaier. Weâd brought along a pair of skis and tried those too, but the sleds were the thing, the flat-bottomed ones shooting us down the hills.
Our fingers and toes were deadened and impliable, such that the walk home was filled with complaining and the calculation of how bad these digits would burn when we filled the tub with hot water for the thaw. We played a game of frostbite one-Âupmanship, insisting nerve damage or blackened skin or amputation was imminent. As we pulled our sleds across the white fairways and greens, the sky began to take on an eerie darkness and suddenly more snow came, not floating, but crashing down, handfuls thrown by the lesser angels and saints, the simmering ones, disgruntled seraphim of the back-office operation whose task it was to remind us that ours is, every so often, a petulant God. And thatâs when I heard, for the first time in my experience of Ohio snowstorms, thunder.
We stumbled toward home in ragged formation, trudging faster through the snow. If you have never experienced an electrical blizzard, it is flat-out unnerving. The difference between thunder in a rainstorm and thunder in a snowstorm is the difference between Jimi Hendrix and Black Sabbath. It is bowling balls hurled toward hell.
We all started to run, pretending not to panic, until we made it home.
*Â Â *Â Â *
Days. Days. Somewhere out there the trucker melted more snow, drawing oxygen through that tube. A meteorologist was stuck at the airport, unable to get homeâthe weatherman himself stranded by the weather. He was taping extra pages onto his chart, the valley of the barometer so low it went to the bottom of the paper scroll and beyond. Somewhere, people were dying and had died.
Faith and belief are not the same thing, and anyone who has lain inside a snow cave at night in the dark of the American Midwest
Three days in, and the blizzard had only worsened. We were lucky; we had power and heat. Even so, we were isolated. Schools were closed, with no clue to when they might reopen. Most people couldnât go anywhere. Many were stranded wherever they had been when the storm hit. Those who did go out often had to turn back. It was hard to understand anymore whether this was an adventure.
Nature will always provide the best metaphors, and here amid the chaos, with the barometer lower than it had ever before been, was a strange coherence. Two weeks before this historic storm, Goodyear announced it was closing its main Akron factory. Nearly fourteen hundred people would be put out of work. A month later, Firestone would announce it was closing its big Akron plant, eliminating twelve hundred jobs. That year, 1978, four thousand people would lose their jobs in a city defined more than anything else by its work.
But as children, we didnât understand all that any more than we understood the barometer. What we understood was the velocity of steel and plastic on ass-groomed ice, caterwauling down the hills, cutting hard into turns and skidding, sideways stops, imagining ourselves at Innsbruck: Dorothy Hamill; Franz Klammer; Rosi Mittermaier. Weâd brought along a pair of skis and tried those too, but the sleds were the thing, the flat-bottomed ones shooting us down the hills.
Our fingers and toes were deadened and impliable, such that the walk home was filled with complaining and the calculation of how bad these digits would burn when we filled the tub with hot water for the thaw. We played a game of frostbite one-Âupmanship, insisting nerve damage or blackened skin or amputation was imminent. As we pulled our sleds across the white fairways and greens, the sky began to take on an eerie darkness and suddenly more snow came, not floating, but crashing down, handfuls thrown by the lesser angels and saints, the simmering ones, disgruntled seraphim of the back-office operation whose task it was to remind us that ours is, every so often, a petulant God. And thatâs when I heard, for the first time in my experience of Ohio snowstorms, thunder.
We stumbled toward home in ragged formation, trudging faster through the snow. If you have never experienced an electrical blizzard, it is flat-out unnerving. The difference between thunder in a rainstorm and thunder in a snowstorm is the difference between Jimi Hendrix and Black Sabbath. It is bowling balls hurled toward hell.
We all started to run, pretending not to panic, until we made it home.
*Â Â *Â Â *
Days. Days. Somewhere out there the trucker melted more snow, drawing oxygen through that tube. A meteorologist was stuck at the airport, unable to get homeâthe weatherman himself stranded by the weather. He was taping extra pages onto his chart, the valley of the barometer so low it went to the bottom of the paper scroll and beyond. Somewhere, people were dying and had died.
Faith and belief are not the same thing, and anyone who has lain inside a snow cave at night in the dark of the American Midwest
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