Brown: No record? Storm still left me spinning
MARK BROWN markbrown@suntimes.com February 2, 2011 6:32PM
Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM
No mas! No mas!
That’s enough snow for anybody.
To those of you who survived the Great Blizzard of 1967, my hat is off to you.
As you already knew, you have earned the right to kvetch and boast about it for the rest of your days. I will never tease you about it again.
I thought I wanted the Blizzard of 2011 to set a new record, 24 inches of snow, to top the record of 23 inches set in ’67. A storm of the century for a new century.
But now I know the truth.
As Jack Nicholson might have told me, “You want the record? You couldn’t handle the record.”
If that’s what 20.2 inches of snow looks like, I don’t ever want to see 23. I’d forgotten what a total pain in the butt this much snow could be.
It’s the drifts that caught me by surprise. I can handle 2 feet of snow, but those 3- to 4-foot drifts nearly brought me to my knees. You forget that you have to deal with those, too.
I’ve been out there shoveling for hours and hours, and I still don’t have the front porch completely cleared off, nor have I made a dent in all that snow in the alley behind the garage, and that’s even after an assist with the front walk from the friendly neighborhood snow-blower man.
Let us pause a moment right here to pay homage to friendly neighborhood snow-blower men everywhere, those kind souls who take pity on those of us who are too cheap to buy a snow-blower or too incompetent to keep it in good working order.
They use their own gas. They seek no compensation. They don’t linger in front of your home waiting for praise. Often, they finish their task before you even knew they were out there.
Unfortunately, the snow-blower man hadn’t gotten started by the time the dog demanded his morning walk, neither of us realizing exactly what we were in for.
We made it about halfway down the block, picking our way through the footsteps of the young children who were out of their houses early to take advantage of a real Snow Day.
This was not one of those wimpy just-to- be-on-the-safe-side Snow Days for school districts with an extra day built into the calendar, but an honest-to-goodness can’t-get-from-here-to-there Snow Day, and the kids seemed to sense the difference, beating their parents out of bed to roll around in the snow. It wasn’t any good for packing, but their squeals proved they were making the most of it.
When Gilbert and I exhausted the pathway through the snow they had trampled, however, there wasn’t anything to do but turn for home and get started with the shovel. His legs were too short for the deep stuff, and mine were getting too tired.
The sun broke through where I live around 10 a.m, which is close enough to O’Hare that I knew from the earlier news reports that there would be no record, even as the snow continued to fall closer to the lakefront for the next couple hours. I’d seen enough by then that I wasn’t disappointed.
My other big mistake from this snowstorm was thinking that the advance warning we received would save us from a recurrence of the situation we had in 1967, with motorists getting stranded on highways and being forced to abandon their cars.
The debacle on North Lake Shore Drive showed otherwise. Now this has become a topic for the usual blame game.
My sympathy is with the people who were riding the CTA buses, who were trying to do the smart thing by taking public transportation and still got in a jam.
The city can say that it warned motorists to stay off Lake Shore Drive, but that doesn’t explain why they sent the buses out there.
Either the road was closed or it wasn’t. If they wanted it open only for bus traffic, they should have said so.
And seeing how this sort of problem had happened in the past, you might have expected a better contingency plan for when things started to go wrong.
Still, I get tired of the scapegoating. Maybe this one time we could just figure out what went wrong and how to avoid the same problem in the future without insisting that somebody take the fall. This was clearly a unique weather situation.
The Blizzard of 2011 may not have set a record, but it left an impression.
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