Sunny Southern California hasn't been so sunny in recent days. But, depending on your perspective, it has been either a refuge or a weather detention center, keeping me from getting back home to snowy, freezing New York, with its winter storm warnings and overly excited meteorologists. I wanna go home! But every flight I've tried has been canceled.
This has left me with lots of time to think about weather. As Mark Twain said, "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." Except grouse. It's as if we 21st century dwellers have forgotten that winter happens and, yes, winter weather happens.
Before I left New York last week, a friend in Los Angeles warned me the weather had been "frightful." As a New Yorker who thinks 40 degrees this winter is a heat wave, I laughed. Sure, I said, it's only 60, huh? But now, with 3 to 5 inches of rain, Southern Californians are worried about flooding.
It's funny how weather dominates our lives. Even those of us whose lives are not guided by the rhythms of farm life as in days of old, when typical predictors were farmers' almanacs, observations about where nesting animals built their homes, joint pains, the shape of the moon, whatever.
A while ago, while I was the ombudsman for The Washington Post, I gained an appreciation for weather buffs, people for whom a newspaper's weather page is a must-read. Why, I once wondered, do people read those pages, which are prepared hours, if not days, in advance? Why, I asked, don't they just look out the window? Well, for some of them, tracking the weather is a hobby the way stamp collecting or Scrabble might be for others. For some, weather is the running story of their lives. Perhaps they have recorded the day's weather with every diary entry since childhood.
Weather is an icebreaker, a conversation starter the way babies ("How cute! Is it a boy or girl?") or a little dog ("How cute! What kind is it?") can be. For us childless, dogless folks, weather is it. There's speculation about when the last frost will occur, marking the start of planting season for certain vegetables. Or talk of whether this wicked winter might hang on and give us snow on Opening Day of the baseball season in April. Or how crazy it is to be scouting potential summer beach house rentals while trudging through so much snow.
Weather is the lead story in the papers, on TV, on radio and a dominant Internet theme. Current conditions. Forecasts. Ski reports. Travel options. Runs on food and emergency supplies at supermarkets and hardware stores.
Nowadays, most of us can't read the sky or Mother Nature's other signs of what's to come, but we've got digitized thermometer-barometer contraptions and The Weather Channel. I used to laugh at people who sat watching round-the-clock reports of weather across the land. But especially while stranded, I, too, watch The Weather Channel and check its weather.com online service. Don't laugh, but I now subscribe to its twice-daily update via e-mail and, for severe weather alerts, via cell phone.
This weather rain on the West Coast, snow on the East Coast, havoc at the airports is a reminder that no matter how advanced we think of ourselves in terms of scientific and technological advances, we are little different from our oldest ancestors in watching the weather in awe, seeking warm, dry places for comfort and wanting to go home.
No comments
Commenting is turned off for this story.