The County appears to have given up, but we remain indomitable.
 
Well, sort of indomitable. Jinny’s flight was cancelled at seven this morning and the cancellations are cascading. She managed to re-book on an earlier plane, but now it is asses-and-elbows to get to the airport or she is going to be stuck with me for another three or four days or maybe the rest of the winter.
 
The next blizzard is coming at noon, so Continental is preemptively canceling things in anticipation.
 
Never in my life have I seen anything like this.
 
The radio says two inches by sunset, then four or five overnight and then ten inches tomorrow. That accumulation will take us to the biggest total snowfall for a winter since the middle of the last century, or at least when records started being kept.
 
There is something about a whopper of a winter in George Washington’s times, but that is the only other event that holds a candle to this, and if there is more the Indians aren’t talking.
 
I saw Death Junior on her way out to the funeral home. She says that Arlington is going to be backed up hundreds of internments by the time things sort themselves out, and airplanes with inbound remains are not getting here. Even the dead can’t get in.
 
We had a rental car for all the driving Jinny was going to do to see old friends. It was buried out in the parking lot in the middle of Big Pink, by the back door in between the high ramparts of the two northerly wings. The sun doesn’t appear there until mid-day and disappears swiftly.
 
We had to return the car, and it was doing no one any good where it was, so I picked up my shovel, donned my parka and went down to dig out.
 
You can tell who is a veteran of these things. Some of the eager beavers were out on Sunday, moving snow from their vehicles and onto other peoples. It was a lot of work, and more work the day after they did their work. First diggers get to pile their snow anywhere they want.
 
By the time I got down, there were few good choices. I attacked the icy parts and then had to carry it to existing piles that the plow had left. After an hour or so I gave up and just started to pile it on cars that were still entombed.
 
The guy who lives above me came by, really agitated. He is not from around here by a few thousand miles, and flies for one of the airlines. He is a nice guy, at least in the summer, and is gone a lot. He was concerned about his wife and the world’s cutest little girl. He seemed to think that the Building has a responsibility to shovel his car out.
 
He is not from around here. He apparently thinks I own a bunch of property here, and accused me of not doing my share to make his life better. I said if he got on the waiting list for a year or two he might get a space in the garage and not have to worry about it.
 
He looked at me in amazement. “You must be joking. Wait for more than a year?”
 
“Yeah, and pay a thousand a year for the privilege. Parking outside is free, though as you can see it does come with a price, periodically.”
 
He roared out of his space, spraying slush, and failed to mark it for his return. I shook my head. You could pay a lot of kids to shovel your space for a thousand a year. I wondered what he was going to think when he came back and found someone in the spot he had cleared out.  
 
I shrugged and turned back to my work. Eventually, I had a path into the drift where I could get the car started and little tunnels into the windshield and the back window. Since I was just going to take the car back to the rental agency, I didn’t care whether my work was particularly neat or polite.
 
That is not the case with the Eager Beavers.
 
Sweat equity is a powerful thing. Up in the Midwest, in Detroit (back when that was a city), and particularly Chicago, the custom is that if you shovel your car out, you are entitled to the place when you come back. You can imagine the consequences, and that is one of the reasons the government is shut down today.
 
If you went to work, there would be no place to park when you got there, and then no place to park when you tried to come home. In the Windy City, people take lawn chairs or other portable devices and park them in the cleared spots to signify ownership.
 
Virginians don’t know the etiquette. I saw cars prowling the narrow lane the snow-plow left in the lot at Big Pink, circling and ready to pounce, but there was nothing to pounce on. The silent hulks slept under heaping mounds of white. The only alternative to digging out a parking place was to just get up a good head of steam and drive into the drift and say “Screw it.”
 
I saw one guy stop his car and look at the plastic lawn chair that was sitting in the middle of a very neat square that had been shoveled right down to the blacktop. It was an absolutely marvelous job, and the lawn chair signified the pride that went along with it.
 
I wondered where the car had gone. Taken the owner to work? Some people are working around here, I know that for a fact, even if others are reading their e-mail at home and pretending.
 
The man got out of his car and lifted the chair onto the top of a drift and pulled into the slot. Then he got out, and walked up to the back door of the building.
 
I had to call down and ask him if he understood “Chicago Rules,” which in snow season means that if you take somebody’s parking place they are free to trash your car.
 
He looked up in surprise, since apparently people don’t talk to him as he skulks in the back door. His mouth was a black “O” as he said “What?”
 
“Never mind,” I called down. “You’ll find out.”

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Subscribe to the RSS feed!