Shelter from the storm

The Boston Herald

A day late and a dollar short. That about sums up this worst storm in 50 years. Monster winds. Record snowfall. Two weather systems converging and stalling. There hasn't been this much hype since the release of "Heaven's Gate," another zealously over advertised bomb.

Winter's wrath? Storm of the century? Right. We've been here before how many times? "This is the big one. We're definitely going to get hit and hit hard. No way this is going to peter out." And there they are, the anointed weather people on our TV, on every station, interrupting, imploring, pointing at maps and charts and overlays, intoning in mighty voices that this is the real thing. That they indeed know the hour. "Make sure you have plenty of flashlights and candles handy."

They promised it was going to snow Sunday. Definitely, they said. Then it was Sunday night for sure. Then it was early Monday morning. Absolutely. Positively. By Monday afternoon local stations were sending reporters out of state to find some snow because all we had here was rain.

The snow finally began falling sometime Monday night. By Tuesday morning it had indeed arrived. But it was just snow, not a record-breaking-remember-the-Donner-party, let's-hold-hands-and-pray-to-God-for-salvation, we're-all-gonna-die-now-snow. I'm beginning to think that weather people are to Americans what Mary Tudor was to the English 500 years ago. Her schtick wasn't: "The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Run quick and get batteries!" But it was just as dramatic.

When Mary Tudor, Queen Mary, the daughter of Henry VIII, announced that she was "with child," this was big news because her child, not her sister Elizabeth, would then be heir to the throne. And so the people waited and watched and counted the days while Mary grew big and bigger. And when the time came for Mary to give birth? There was no child.

Did Mary dupe the people? Or did she really believe she was pregnant? Are the weather people in cahoots with the bread and potato chip people? Do they own stock in Wonder and Lays, or do they really believe that each time a low front meets a high front and the moon is in the seventh sun, calamity is inevitable?

And what about this perception of snow as a calamity? An asteroid slamming into the earth would be a calamity. Botox in our water supply would be a calamity. Nuclear fallout would be a calamity. But snow is just snow, a natural product of winter as well as the subject of thousands of poems all lauding it. So what does it say about us and our modern world if the mere possibility of these benign flakes can shut our world down?

Schools and businesses all along the East Coast were closed Monday, all "non-essential" workers urged to stay home not because the roads were impassable, not because there were gale-like winds, not because there was limited visibility, but because meteorologists said that there would be! Businesses lost money. Everyone else lost time. And while our world paused, what did we do? We watched TV and the rain outside our windows while waiting for the snow to fall.

The Trojans had Cassandra as their prophet of doom. The Romanovs had Rasputin. We have meteorologists. Their science is impressive: climatology, aerology, barometry, pneumatics, satellites and hygrometers and weather stations and weather networks. State of the art. But in the end the weather is out of man's control. It can be plotted but it can't be predicted. Meteorologists speak and God laughs.