When I was a boy, I dreamed of a snowstorm so powerful that houses would be buried up to their rooftops. I would dig long tunnels to my girlfriend’s house and burrow right up to her window. If an overprotective dad or punk older brother came running, I’d vanish in a labyrinth of snow that I had prepared ahead of time.
I never saw a storm of that magnitude. Another thing I never saw back then were screaming headlines in every newspaper or round-the-clock storm coverage on television.
The TV folks are particularly excitable. They start warning of an approaching snowstorm roughly a month before it gets here. They display impressive radar images and helpful hints about how you can prepare for the wrath of winter.
Stock up on bottled water. Get extra batteries and for God’s sake, make sure you know where your candles are. Stay off the roads at all costs. If you have to be out, make sure you have blankets, shovels and a rosary in your car in case things get really bad.
Helpful tips that swarms of people follow step by horrified step. The lines at the grocery stores will be long. Fistfights will break out over Duracell batteries. Normally peaceful women will punch you in the jaw if you make a move toward that last gallon of spring water.
The media goes on for days about the looming storm, as if the time of judgment were at hand. TV weather people use laser pointers to show dark clumps on their radar screens as they try to say “nor’easter.”
It wasn’t always this way, I’m sure of it. We had machismo and grit one day not so long ago. We scoffed at storms then. We shoveled until our fingers bled, and then went out to play, to work or to brave dangerous siblings in order to see our girlfriends.
I had the misfortune of getting into a weather discussion the other day with a group of people. We were expecting up to 18 inches at the time and everyone was talking about it. Snow in February, they said. Imagine it!
But the group I was chatting with was not impressed. They remembered real storms back in the ’50s and ’60s. So much snow that you’d get a nosebleed if you climbed up on top of a snowbank. So much snow that you had to crawl through a second-story window to get out of your house. You needed a team of dogs to get to school, which was never canceled back then because people were tougher. Short people had to carry flags in case they sunk in over their heads. Entire villages disappeared.
And so on. I was enjoying this trip down memory lane. Then one man involved in the conversation leveled a finger at me and scowled.
“You wanna know the reason people are so wimpy about snow these days? There’s your reason. That guy, right there.”
He meant me, a representative of the media. And if he was looking for an argument, he didn’t get one. No one decries the media’s overreaction to snowstorms more than I do. When you see a weather story with my name on it, you can trust that a team of editors forced me into it by threatening all sorts of unpleasantness.
Trudging out into the snow and asking hard-hitting questions like (please imagine a nasal nerd-voice here): “So, what do you think of the snow? A lot of it, huh?” is not my idea of journalistic good times. The worst weather assignment is the advance story. When reporters are asked to write a hair-raising piece about an oncoming storm, we talk to weather experts. We talk to people who sell shovels and snowblowers. We get the forecast figures and unleash them in large headlines. Then the storm peters out and we get hit with a half-inch of playful snow. The reporter looks like a bonehead. His colleagues point and laugh at him.
So, yeah. It’s all our fault. When I hear about pending storms these days, I don’t think of long, white tunnels snaking across the city. I don’t think of sleds and snowballs, either. I think of gross exaggeration and the decline of Maine fortitude in all things weather-related. Immediately after I wrote that last sentence, an editor walked over to my desk. She was shaking her head sadly and bracing herself for a tantrum. Another editor had decided I should do a weather story in advance of the approaching storm. An editor who comes from a state south of us and who has been here less than a year. And so I ask you: Should there not be a law against someone from away assigning a weather story?
Thank you. Please sign my petition.
Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter.
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