(Obviously this was meant to go live in 2023, but why waste it? Maybe it's a good thing to think about winter storms before we start seeing them.)
If you listen to the baby-boomers at the Weather Service, in Georgia and Tennessee the snowstorm of the twentieth century was the Blizzard of 1993.
Pooh. That's like saying the late summer storm of the twentieth century was Hurricane Floyd. If 1993 was Floyd, 1997 was Camille...at the Cat Sanctuary, anyway. Other people's memories differ.
Well...it was March, so people weren't expecting a major snow. In most of the Southern States nobody ever expects more than two feet of snow at a time. The Weather Service saw the Blizzard coming--up from Georgia--and whoever heard of a big snowstorm coming from the south?
Anyway, Thursday, the eleventh of March, had been chilly but not cold. Some flowers were starting to bud, if not bloom. It had been a long cold winter; we'd seen our usual quota of snow.
Friday, the wind turned cold, and snow started to fall, and it didn't stop.
For some reason Gate City didn't get the full effect of the Blizzard of'93. It was Big Snow. We don't usually get Big Snow twice in one year, and we'd already had one, so it was unusual. It wasn't deeper than my boot tops. It was easy to walk through.
Kingsporters, however, will tell you they never saw such a snow in all their lives.
Now, the Weather Service admits that all Kingsport actually logged was 14 inches of snow. They'd seen more snow than that at one time before, and they have since. Maybe it was just that the roads weren't salted and froze faster than usual as the temperature dropped faster than usual. Partly it was that most Southerners would rather crawl on their knees than try to drive in snow, and most of the ones who do try to drive in snow shouldn't. Mostly it was that cyclone winds were lifting snow off the ground even as more was falling out of the sky, so people couldn't see the road before them clearly. Kingsporters aren't accustomed to that. They use the word "blizzard" to mean Big Snow. This was a real one.
Anyway, only emergency vehicles were on the roads for hours, and many people who had gone to work on Friday morning spent the weekend at work.
In what are normally called "the higher elevations" in my part of Virginia, which do not include my home, things were even worse. Somewhere in the town of Wise they measured 30 inches of fresh snow; after the blizzard people photographed evidence of 48" drifts.
The worst inconvenience for most people was, as usual, the power grid. As usual, trees dropped snow-crusted limbs across power lines and power lines went down. Nobody had electricity for many days...
Except the retirees in what had not yet become Bedbug Towers. They had gasoline generators. Big ones, that could, in sequence, keep the building heated and lighted for four or five days. By a peculiar coincidence that was about how long the power outage lasted; it was still possible for the company to direct linemen to reconnect them first, the "grid" mania hadn't made it commonplace for our whole town to be blacked out because a pole cracked in Kentucky. Neighborhoods' grids were still fairly well separated. So the retirees' frozen food stayed frozen, they bathed in hot running water, and most of them had adult children and grandchildren visit them to take advantage of these conveniences.
My father had just moved into his dimly lighted, easily accessible flat, and set up a new radio to listen to the weather news on WJCW, which put the usual ball games and talk shows on "pause" and broadcast Blizzard reports all weekend. He spent much of the weekend sitting by the radio. He called what he was doing "rooting" rather than praying, because it was neither a formal prayer service nor a mystical contemplative kind of prayer; I'd call it a kind of praying. His opinions of most people were low, but he did care about them and want hardship conditions to be relieved. Most people had land-line telephones back then; many of the telephones worked when the electricity didn't, so Dad was buzzing all his cousins on the phone, checking on their families and relaying reports about situations that might be alleviated.
There were a lot of those situations. People who weren't in any real danger, but were just unprepared, kept calling WJCW and wringing their hands. "We're stranded without heat" was the usual wail. Instead of playing pop songs the radio DJs were broadcasting, "Another report of a household without heat in This town on That road," and people were calling in, "I have kerosene if someone can deliver it," "I have a Coleman stove," "I have a spare generator," and emergency responders were delivering these things. It was a once-in-a-lifetime weekend. Thank goodness.
Rebecca Solnit has written books, one titled Paradise Built in Hell, about weekends like that one. There's a "high," an actual measurable adrenalin rush akin to what people feel in battle or fighting fires, and akin to what they feel on learning to swim or ride a bicycle. You open your eyes, realize you're still alive, and start noticing all the things you can do.
"Where're you going?" your grumpy old relative growls as you start to leave the building.
"Out to clear a path!" you carol. Normally the retirement project has people who clear the paths and mow the grass and so on. Today it's obvious that those people won't get in for some time, so you shovel.
Part of what makes this so memorable for baby-boomers is that, in 1993, nearly all of us could still enjoy shovelling snow. We knew we'd wake up with stiff muscles in the morning, but most of us didn't have rheumatic joints or bad backs or bad knees to worry about.
You go out and shovel your snow. You see Neighbor A. A can't get to work and would like to get paid for shovelling snow. You refer him to B, who can afford to pay. B knows of a way to get to where you had planned to spend the weekend. You get into the truck of the person B knows, and soon come to a house where a tree has fallen across the driveway. B's friend C has a saw so you get out and stack up wood while C saws...You are healthy and strong and alive. The blood tingles through your veins. You feel fine. You feel so fine that, when you come to a store that someone has dared to open, you go in and buy oranges for C's children. And so on. All weekend long.
Nature didn't intend for this "high" to last very long, yet some religious people, medical people, and emergency responders feel a vocation to live according to the insights the "high" brought them. Solnit documented that whole, viable intentional communities have formed as people worked to recover from natural disasters.
If not intentional communities, at least neighborhood spirit tends to rise after people have been through hard times together. Kingsport, Bristol, and Johnson City are the "Tri-Cities" for which the airport was named. For people in Gate City, Kingsport is almost (but not quite) home; many of us never walked into Kingsport but, in the twentieth century, that was only because walking ten miles takes time. Bristol is a place we visited occasionally, not necessarily in every single year. Johnson City is further into Tennessee than most of us have any reason to drive--an exception, of course, being students who used to go to East Tennessee State University rather than UVa or Virginia Tech because it's closer to home. During the Blizzard, though, Johnson City was where the radio station broadcast the reports that helped people help each other. A family there might have something a family here needed, or vice versa. Suddenly people in Johnson City started to seem like neighbors, in the extended or New Testament sense of people who may not live on an adjacent lot but who are near enough to help or to be helped.
In its way, the Blizzard of'93 was fun. "The perfect storm," someone told a newspaper reporter, because, in about as much time as it took people to enjoy helping each other repair the damage, the snow melted away. During the next week the early-blooming flowers started to bloom. Anyway, although some trees were lost and there was a report of a roof caving in, the Blizzard of'93 did very little lingering damage to Gate City or Kingsport.
Every winter has a storm. Some are worse than others. The awfulness of different storms in different neighborhoods varies, but everybody can always count on at least a few days of inconvenience.
We can't always afford to be as well prepared as we'd like to be...Be prepared, Gentle Readers.
