No Accumulation

I was bitterly disappointed in the snow. I did not have the leeway accorded to the Fairfax County Schools, or any of the local districts to cancel the day. They closed their doors before the first flakes really started in Arlington.

But it is to be expected, I thought. The County sprawls almost to the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains and people that work here actually have to live out there where the snow comes early.

I wandered out the front door just after five to look around, poking up like a mole from my patio. There was nothing falling, the pavement dry. The murmur at the top of the hours was filled with the school closings, but there was nothing about the Federal Government. The weather map on my computer showed dense clouds, and it was apparently snowing out to the west.

I was impatient with the news. The radio told me the President was meeting his pal Vladimir in Bratislava to chat about democracy, and an Iraqi wearing a police uniform had driven a car into shift change at a police headquarters in Tikrit, killing at least ten and wounding dozens. Improvised explosive devices placed on the roadside killed two American soldiers.

We need a bigger Army and a smaller Air Force, I scowled. They are almost the same size, and we clearly need more flexibility. The radio was not helping me. The bird flu was coming out of Asia, maybe today. I can deal with the pandemic later, I thought. Was the government closed, or not?

I looked out the top half of the plantation shutters. Heavy white flakes were now falling, melting as they hit the ground. Past the swimming pool enclosure the parking lot glistened black with moisture.

What a strange season. It had been sixty degrees a few weeks ago. There were kids in shorts. The woman at the dental office said the daffodils were coming up in Richmond, a hundred miles to the south. I saw things poking up from the soil in the decorative gardens in front of Big Pink. The sun was still up when I returned from the office.

Things should be looking up, and now there is snow, really the first of the year, and more of it on the way. The rains that were washing California into the sea have apparently arrived here as a frozen cocktail.

But there was no empiric reason to cancel the day, not in Arlington, anyway, and I had a precious appointment at the Heritage Auto Plaza to have a grinding sound in the steering looked at. I had already balanced the calendar against it, and canceling would mean re-juggling next week’s calendar and it would be a new month, the second quarter of the fiscal year almost in the bag before I have got used to writing ”2005” on my checks.

It was a delicate triangulation. The car dealer is located near the end of the Yellow Line of the Metro at Huntington. I could drop the car, and take the train down to Gallery Place/Chinatown in the District and walk the half mile to my office at the Bus Station on NewYork Avenue. If there was nothing catastrophic in the steering gear, I could repeat the process in the afternoon and hope that no one in the packed car was spreading the pandemic.

But suppose conditions changed? I remembered the Veteran’s Day storm in 1987. There had been a fine sleet coming down when I left the house in Fairfax just after five in the morning, and by the ten o’clock coffee-break there were already six inches of snow on the ground, and it was still piling up. The confused people at the Office of Personnel Management let the Federal workforce go home all at the same time.

We all piled onto the roads that had not yet been plowed, and the snow kept coming. The trains could not move outside the tunnels and the buses skidded off the roads.

It took seven hours to cover the fifteen miles home in an improvised car pool with my boss. Some people who rode the bus didn’t get home until midnight, and there was a foot of wet white stuff that closed off the suburban neighborhoods altogether.

It was a seminal moment for a new resident of Washington. I viewed the heavens with suspicion ever after, since the confluence of the winds and mountains to the west and the water against our backs makes the District a vortex for swiftly changing road conditions.

I showered and laid out some sensible clothing. A nice shirt, a black sweater. Walking shoes. A second-string tie went in the briefcase, just in case an important meeting fell from the sky. A warm camel-hair sport coat for the same reasons, a sky-blue ballcap with the word ”Bosnia” across the front and the trench-coat completed the winter ensemble. I looked out the door again.

It was snowing harder than ever, but it was not covering the roads. Plenty of snow in the air, but no accumulation. Appearance and no substance.

Damn. Another ambiguity in a city that thrives on it. There was no excuse not to go. So I picked up my briefcase and went.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

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