The News: A User's Manual

Nature

Only hours from now, the Tri-State Area will be blanketed by record heavy snow and hit by exceptionally powerful winds. The National Weather Service has issued a blizzard warning for all of New York City, Long Island, northeastern New Jersey, Connecticut and southern Westchester County. Snow accumulations are expected to range from 20 to 24 inches, with the higher amounts north and east of New York City. In many area grocery stores, shelves are bare, with people rushing to stock up on essentials ahead of a super storm that could force them inside for many days.

CBS News

1.

… Rather cloudy and warm, with most places remaining dry overnight but a little light rain or drizzle is still possible, mainly in the east …

We normally pay the weather little attention. It behaves roughly as it should and therefore stays outside of the news itself. It is rare for us even to look up for long. We certainly don’t follow the example of John Constable, who for periods between 1821 and 1822 spent several hours each day on the slopes of Hampstead Heath, intently examining the moods of the sky, producing 150 precise and quietly stunning watercolour, crayon and oil studies of the vaporous shapes drifting over his head – in a process of devoted observation he called ‘skying’.

Our eyes are instead fixed on the human drama below: who was promoted; where bond prices might be headed; how the budget stand-off was resolved. What is above us in the atmosphere is daily simplified into one or another of those icons beloved of weather forecasters, which, in their naive reductiveness, stand in relation to the subtleties of the sky rather as news reports stand in relation to the complexities of existence.

2.

… The snow storm is right now on its way northeast, threatening 20 states and 160 million residents in its path …

Until the day when nature forces itself upon our distracted attentions through one of its major disruptive events: a tornado, a flood, a blizzard, a tsunami or another kind of localized apocalypse.

John Constable, Cloud Study, 1821.

(picture credit 17.1)

In the case of this snowstorm, the forecasters have the monster well mapped. In the National Weather Center, an IBM Power 7 supercomputer, with a peak processing performance of one petaflop, keeps the glacial spectre firmly within its sights, though the ability to predict what will happen gives the experts no power whatsoever to alter nature’s implacable intent.

Seven major airports will be shut down and some 8,000 flights cancelled or delayed. All major highways in the area will be closed. School will be suspended. Power lines will fall.

The governor of New Jersey has appeared on television and called the storm an ‘impending catastrophe’. But it won’t be only that. It will also have some of the distinctive and not entirely off-putting qualities of a brief war won by one’s own side.

3.

… Residents of North Canaan, Connecticut, among them small children, lost power in the early hours and had to be evacuated to a series of nearby motels by the emergency services, where they remain …

Living is something of an emergency anyway, but our struggles must usually be strenuously concealed. Our anxieties churn away within us, yet on the outside we must smile and deliver upbeat answers to enquiries about how we’re doing. The storm calls a temporary end to this charade. With the wind howling outside, we’re allowed to be worried and, even more blessedly, we can direct our worries towards something large, objective and (however odd this might sound to the patrol crews who are out gritting the roads) relatively simple – for it is ultimately easier to dig, rescue, save and resuscitate than to meet the challenges of those quieter, more temperate days when we are left alone to bear the responsibilities of making a living, staying in love, raising sane children and not wasting our brief lives.

The storm helps us to reconnect with other people too. At normal times, we can’t presume what is on their minds, but now we have a ready-made point of connection and communion with just about anyone. Normally our impressions of what other people are like, largely formed by news bulletins, can inspire the conclusion that everyone must be either a murderer or a paedophile, but in the storm it hardly seems that way; in fact, they show a proclivity for swaddling shivering dogs, serving soup to the stranded and pushing strangers’ SUVs out of snowdrifts. Against the backdrop of miles of polar whiteness, the value of any fellow human is thrown into relief. Criteria for compatibility drop to the modest level at which they should perhaps always have been. As when we are drunk, it feels as though we could love anyone.

4.

… Some of the strongest snow falls were reported near Allegheny National Forest and in the area around DuBois and Slippery Rock …

There is poetry in the names of distant parts of the country which we have never been to nor perhaps even suspected existed. Naive artworks spring to mind, depicting remote homesteads, water towers, painted barns – an older way of life in which people know about livestock and flowers and taking their time; rebukes to our ignorant, technologically overconfident city ways.

5.

… Officials announced that the whiteout conditions had forced the airport to shut down completely. Earlier, conditions had reduced air traffic to a single runway, but maintenance workers were having trouble seeing each other through the blinding snow.

Everything is upside down. Aircraft that normally soar to 35,000 feet now sit idle in serried ranks, immobilized under heavy coats of snow. A pilot makes a show of trying to dig out an Airbus A320 with a shovel. The power goes out in the headquarters of an insurance firm and the otherwise sober employees head outside to make snowmen. After the pipes freeze at a chic hotel, the guests exchange the isolated luxury of their rooms for the brightly lit conviviality of a nearby ice rink.

Nature puts us all in our places. Being made to feel small isn’t something we welcome when it’s done to us by another person, but to be apprised of our essential nothingness by something so much greater than ourselves is in no sense humiliating. Our egos, exhaustingly aware of every slight they receive and prone relentlessly to compare their advantages with those enjoyed by others, may even be relieved to find themselves finally humbled by forces so much more powerful than any human being could ever muster.

In former times, we would be put in our places by the threat of the divine. The gods would quench our hubris and in thunderous voices remind us not to exceed our stations. In a largely secular age, however, it falls to nature, and in particular to so-called ‘bad weather’, to take up this role and to the news to spread the word. It is the isobars and cold fronts that remind us that – for all our clever machines and ingenious ways – we are still weak and must learn at times simply to surrender to events. We fret and complain, but have no option other than to succumb to an enforced meteorological Sabbath.

Across the eastern seaboard, the mobile masts are down, the power is out, the trucks are stranded, the supermarkets are closed, snow is falling over Central Park and adding another layer to the pines in Mohawk Forest. It is a disaster, a calamity, the worst storm in a generation: the news isn’t lying about that. But it might add, this disaster is a lesson in wisdom, too. Tidy modern technological society, marked by its constant competitive solipsism, has done most of us sufficient harm that we may not mind so very much when, for a time at least, it gets a little roughed up by nature’s awesomely indifferent hand.

(picture credit 17.2)