We are perhaps about to be reminded that, as E.E. Cummings wrote,
“the snow doesn’t give a soft white damn whom it touches.”
Whatever accumulation of powder Tuesday brings, everybody knows that New York just doesn’t have blizzards like we used to. Since the federal government began keeping records in 1869, the deepest accumulation of snow ever measured in Central Park was 27.5 inches way back in… January, 2016. Okay, that’s an anomaly.
The second biggest dusting New York has experienced was 26.9 inches in… February, 2006. The number three and four slots go to blizzards in 1947 and 1888, respectively. But places five through nine begin to look suspiciously like a trend: 20.9 inches in February, 2010; 20.2 inches in January, 1996; 20 inches in December, 2010; 19.8 inches in February, 2003; and 19 inches in January, 2011.
Well, if we’re facing another snowmageddon every two or three years, that at least means we don’t have to worry so much about global warming, right? Not so fast. Although we intuitively associate snow with cold, which everybody knows is the polar opposite of warmth, meteorologists and climate scientists don’t see it that way. For them, snow, rain, and every other kind of precipitation are a function of how much water vapor is suspended in the atmosphere, rather than being “stored” in oceans, rivers, lakes, and ice caps. From this perspective, as the planet gets warmer, more water evaporates into the air, and eventually falls back to earth as (among other things) snow. And atmospheric water vapor has jumped by about five percent since the beginning of the Twentieth Century, with most of that increase coming after 1970. So the greater frequency and severity of winter whiteouts actually argues for — rather than against — climate change.
Still, it’s hard to shake the notion that they don’t make snowstorms like they used to. The Great White Hurricane of March, 1888 (which dropped 21 inches of snow in Central Park) paralyzed the City for days, cutting off rail and road traffic. Worse, New York was rendered deaf, mute, and blind, as frost-encased electric, telegraph and telephone lines all fell to the ground. (One reform prompted by this crisis was to begin moving such wires underground.) The 1888 storm killed more than 200 people in the five boroughs, and as many again in affected communities stretching from Maryland to Maine.
But heavier storms of late have had a lighter impact, which may be a function of technology, and better preparation. In the 1880s, ambulances, fire trucks, and snow plows were all powered by horses, who were every bit as immobilized as their human masters. Unable to travel more than a city block in tall drifts, they also lacked the strength to haul away million of tons of slush.
By 1947, a storm that buried New York in nearly five inches more snow than the 1888 whiteout exacted fewer than half as many fatalities: 77. The toll in human lives for the 1996 deluge (20.2 inches) shrank further to a few dozen. And by the time the worst-ever storm hit, in January, 2016, New York City’s loss of life dropped to three people, all of whom died while shoveling snow.
So instead of trying to dig yourself out on Tuesday, dig in and take the advice of Wallace Stevens, whose 1923 poem, “The Snow Man,” reflects on the contemplation that a blizzard can inspire, speaking of,
“the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
Or consider the words of Lewis Carrol, who asked in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass”: “I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says, ‘Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.'”
Finally, perhaps take as your anthem the lines by New York’s own Billy Collins (Poet Laureate of the United States, 2001 – 2003), whose “Snow Day” recalls:
“Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,
its white flag waving over everything,
the landscape vanished,
not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,
and beyond these windows
the government buildings smothered,
schools and libraries buried, the post office lost
under the noiseless drift,
the paths of trains softly blocked,
the world fallen under this falling.”