It is the sound of slush flying from Route 50 below the balcony that I hear this morning. There is a rush hour, of sorts, since the Federal Behemoth has decided to slumber one more day, but there are people of commerce who are headed in to try to salvage something out of the retail end of President’s Day. Recovery is a twelve-step process, after all, and though tentative, we are stepping out.

The news of the weather disaster has shifted focus north and east, where New York and New Jersey are still under a state of emergency. But things are beginning to turn around here, the chemicals are taking hold and I can see strips of asphalt emerging on the big road below. It is 26 degrees, and there is something that looks like snow coming down. It is still before dawn, though just barely. I have been listening to the BBC and NPR is a desultory fashion. The snowstorm is still in the news but it is moving down the list of topics. The NY Times this morning sums it up as an also-ran storm, fourth largest in New York history, but not even in the top five down here. It had been hyped by the weather guys on TV as the monster of all time. For us, in truth, it is only the biggest storm since 1996.

Bob Edwards reported this morning that despite all the super-computer modeling that the weather guys have, the fellow tasked with reporting the meteorological readings at Reagan National Airport uses a ruler stick in the drift. So I think the fix is in on this one, just like it was back when the Park Service issued official tallies on the number of people who attended rallies on the Mall. That ended with the alleged undercount of the Million Man March. So maybe we should take the airport out of the snow reporting business and issue our own estimates.

It took me an hour and half to get the Chrysler dug out yesterday, and it was a hell of a lot more than 13.2 inches. I’m not well prepared here, soft in my Virginia old age. My gloves were in the car and my shovel was in the trunk. So I had a challenge, wading first over the compacted drift left by the plow and then into the loose stuff between the red Jeep and my car. The owner of the Jeep has Virginia plates that read “I Ms SD,” which I take to mean the lunatic is sentimental about South Dakota. He-or-she had not come out to shovel yet, and I knew that whatever I did would be undone by whoever came after me, but c’est la vie.

I pried the door open far enough to get the gloves, and then hoisted the trunk far enough to discover that the shovel was buried under golf clubs and terrorist-survival equipment. The shovel is one of those folding deals designed for emergency use, and collapsed regularly to add some spice to the recovery process. But that was good exercise and useful to frame the task when the South Dakotan buried me again that afternoon getting him-or-herself out.

I grimly wished whoever owned the Jeep an extended trip back to the Badlands and dug out again.

I give high marks to Mayor Anthony Williams who left his sun-drenched cabana in Puerto Rico to come back into this mess to spend some quality sound-bite time with the sanitation crews who have been working around the clock to move the snow. It is a problem, a big one. In the old days they simply would have dumped it in the Potomac or the Anacostia Rivers, and the salt and chemicals would have moved slowly down into the Chesapeake Bay.

It will anyway, with the melt, but for environmental reasons they are at least letting it melt on land. Maybe that will act as a bit of a filter. Hizzoner says that it will take 60 hours to dig us out fully, though he did not say when the clock began to tick. I assume they will have some flexibility tomorrow, but most of us will be expected to be back at our desks.

There are a lot of folks who will be chomping at the bit, acting like Dressage horses, showing impulse and submission to the System. There are important memos to write, PowerPoint presentations to be done. But for me, there are stacks of things to read, and the paperwork I have put off for days to get through, perhaps some laundry and the truck to dig out, not that I will expose the baby to the salt. Because the world outside the 720-mile wide swath of snow is still churning.

Chicago and Taegu were joined yesterday in senseless tragedy. The E-2 nightclub upstairs from the Epitome restaurant and the subway, respectively, were the scenes of mass casualty. There were 1,500 people crammed into a second floor club in Chicago when security guys tried to breakup a cat-fight with a hefty dose of pepper spray, and more than twenty were crushed in the ensuing stampede. In the south-central Korean town of Taegu a “disturbed middle-aged individual” hurled a plastic milk carton filled with a burning incendiary liquid into a subway car packed with commuters. The number of dead is still unknown, though significant, since rescue officials have only been able to count the dead on the platform and have not yet sorted out the interior of the car.

I used to go to Taegu when I lived in Korea a zillion years ago. I would take the Blue Train south from Seoul to the port city of Pusan and munch dried cuttlefish purchased from the lady with the snack cart. The countryside around Taegu was flat and green. There was a small U.S. presence here, and Task Force Smith continued their desperate rear-guard action to slow the invading North in the rice paddies here. In those days, before the Seoul Olympics and the dramatic modernization, Taegu was a bustling country town. Now it sprawls like a mini-Seoul. Neither it nor the capital had subways then, and now they do. Progress is wonderful. You’d hardly recognize the place with all the new cookie-cutter apartment blocks.

Which is the immediate back-drop to the North declaring that it was considering abrogating the Armistice that ended the Police Action on the Peninsula. You will note that it is an Armistice, not a peace treaty, so I suppose they are saying that the fifty-year pause in the action was a good breather and they are ready to go again. I am not quite sure what they are up to. Pyongyang’s Foreign Ministry is accusing America of building up forces and trying to contain the little state. They are a little paranoid, or maybe they are justified in thinking someone is really out to get them.

I talked to Kim Yong Sun over lunch a few years ago. He was then Secretary of the Central Committee of the Worker’s Party of Korea, and Chairman of not only the Reunification Policy Committees, but also the Asia-Pacific Peace and Anti-Nuclear bodies. He was an older gentleman with dark full hair and merry eyes framed by gold rimmed gasses. He wore a sober dark business suit. Based on the lunch we were provided, he had an evident appetite for life. We had a long chat in which I politely asked about his armies long range multiple rocket launchers that were pre-surveyed to hit targets in Seoul. He countered with a riposte about the nature of aircraft carriers as defensive weapons. I conceded he had a point, it was just a matter of where the defense was made. He agreed, and we laughed.

The radio is saying that the North’s current position is a cry for help. I suppose that is true, but according to the self-help books, the start of recovery sometimes calls for an intervention. It might be better for both sides to start a twelve-step process.

In the meantime, I have some recovery issues of my own. I am going to go dig out my truck of the snow bank and get back to work in the morning.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra