"I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with the nonhuman world and somehow survives...Paradox and bedrock."-Edward Abbey

31 January 2014

Weatherly Perspective

When the national news is not talking about that crazy scene in DC-it's just a power-mad town-or someone rich and important doing something scandalous, word has been about the weather. Great maelstroms. Droughts. The midwest is apparently in the grips of another ice age.

Good thing nothing's wrong with the planet. That and there's no need for 'Merica to get involved with the Kyoto Protocol. Oh, and the rich people shouldn't be taxed, because, you know, they're going to save the rest of us cattle.

Wow...for a second there I almost got political...

There's the story of Atlanta being paralyzed by two and half inches of snow. Of course it was. It's the fucking south. My family lived in that region for three and a half unfortunate years when I was an adolescent. During our first winter, it snowed, once!, three muthafuckinginches no less, and the region we were in was paralyzed for a week. My mother made fun of the same people who called her, my brother, sister, and I yankees as she got around in the wintry wonderland without hindrance.

Yeh, calling us yankees...didn't they win that fucking war? Oh, and by the way, Colorado wasn't even a fucking state back when that war happened!

Sempai lived in Atlanta twenty years prior to coming to our Sahel. He remarks he had a better time of living in Appalachia than I did, and he's married, to a man. I surmise this was his urban verses my rural.

It's funny, as the sun sets, the sky clears from a two and a half day storm, I estimate a foot and a half to two feet of fresh snow. There was obligations and getting wood pellets for our stove. Shoveling and higher boots. You could hear the avalanches roaring not too far away. Travelers were terrified, transporters annoyed, and the locos got by. So it goes.

Sempai wishes the media would lay off Atlanta. It's the south, this shit happens maybe once every twenty years. I am sympathetic. Although my life in the Confederacy was not nearly as decent as his, I've seen how winter weather we don't even really blink at knocks the slats out from under those folks.

Of course, I remember southern heat and humidity vividly. Here at ninety-one sixty, we get above seventy-five quaint 'Merican degrees and it's a heatwave. One-hundred on the fahrenheit scale with as much humidity? We'd have old-timers dropping in all directions from heatstroke. Down there, they fan themselves, turn on the air conditioner along with the NASCAR, and sip something cool, which may or may not be laced with liberal amounts of alcohol. We start a fire and throw on an extra layer when it gets below forty.

Perspective is the buzzword of the day...

Our big winter storm made the metroplex news. Just enough to scare the flatlanders to not come up for a day, but to get the urban snowbums to touch themselves in their no-no places with glee as they ran for the hill-powder's gonna be good! A quick glance at the the national speaks that the novelty of Atlanta's recent weather 'pocalypse has gone and worn off. That's okay. Weather changes, as does what the hot news item is. Funny that.

Outside, the skies clear. It'll probably get rather frigid overnight. Come Sunday, I'll be off snowshoeing in the recent snow, and I can hardly wait for Tuesday, for more snow might come. Hopefully, the avi danger won't be so high. Half a world away, in Atlanta, the snow and ice will have disappeared into the stuff of apocrypha, fantasy, and/or nightmare, and that's okay. Different worlds, different landscapes, different weather. So it goes.         

8 comments:

  1. I was utterly amazed that two inches of snow could paralyze Atlanta like that. I have a couple of friends there and they were posting pictures on FB of the pandemonium. You'd think the zombie apocalypse had finally broken out!!

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    1. I actually heard the zombie analogy from a traveler the other day. They too, were from the south. Small world.

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  2. You're right about perspective. When I was a kid in Alaska, I just assumed the whole world had months of darkness with monumental snows...and milk came in frozen blocks.

    Civilization was a rude awakening... ;D

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    1. When we moved to North Carolina, it was quite the culture shock. And I've never understood how someone could live without at least mountains in the distance.

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  3. Okay, so you may or may not remember that my dad was in the Air Force, so we lived in a bunch of awesome places. One of those places was Warner Robbins, Georgia. We lived there for two years, and I have absolutely no memory of any snow. And the sad truth is, if it had snowed three inches, I probably would have reacted the same as you, because we had moved to Georgia straight from King Salmon, Alaska, where it did indeed snow quite a bit. Blizzards were the norm, and we never missed a day of school.
    Silly Georgians.

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    1. I hear that Valdez, Alaska averages five-hundred inches of snow a year. Our last storm, righteous in its countenance, would've scarcely gotten notice there.

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  4. It is all relative, for sure. I met with a sales guy from Atlanta last week and even he was sheepish over how wimpy their reaction was.

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    1. I can imagine, but then again, imagine if that storm had happened in somewhere like Miami. There'd be benefit concerts for the victims.

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