Yet another storm is making its way across the midsection of the country. I've lost track of how many times this winter that people's lives have been disrupted in major ways by weather.
I don't know how people emotionally respond to weather conditions in other parts of the world. But its effects are felt in sometimes significant ways in this temperate zone of North America. Here in the Upper Midwestern city in which I live, hospital beds are overflowing with depressed people.
When I was seeing clients, I learned there was a predictable pattern. In January, which seemed to last at least six weeks, people were too busy coping with shoveling snow, keeping their cars running, and scraping ice off of windshields to call a therapist. By February, people figured that whatever was bothering them would go away when snow began melting - a lot of "hanging on to the edge" by their fingernails. But by March, they were desperate.My phone would ring of the hook, creating a spike in the number of clients I saw.
Years ago, mortician shared with my husband that more people died in April than at any other time -counter-intuitive to thinking that post-holiday times would see an increase in deaths. What the mortician figured is that people hung on to life through winter. When April came, they "let-go" and poof, their bodies did too. So don't breathe too big a sigh of relief when snow-melt runs down the streets. It could be fatal!
When our children entered college, we were no longer bound by school schedules. We discovered that a couple of weeks in warmer places made the lengthy winter more enjoyable. No longer did we experience weather-impatience - and we avoided the "March blues," sometimes known as cabin fever.
We recently returned from a trip to the Southwest - a trip we hoped would give us respite from this particularly long winter. Instead, heavy use of the Weather Channel (and our dandy new iPhone was a second tool - how tech-savvy we are becoming!) became our major route planner, in order to avoid this winter's series of monster storms.
It was not the vacation we had dreamed of for months! Although we planned well and missed the worst of the action, winter weather played a major part in our time away. Ana adventures we did have!
When we left, Storm Saturn was due to hit that evening. We drove late into the night to to be out of its path. Now I will say - looking for a motel in the dark in unfamiliar territory is not too cool. From the freeway, we saw a sign for an AmericanMotel, thinking it meant AmericInn. Wrong - we spent the night in a $50 a night place modeled on those storage bins. It was clean with an old-fashioned TV- but definitely not the more luxurious quarters we wanted. The fun had begun!
Still tracking the weather, we spent the next day marveling at the migrating sandhill cranes in mid-Nebraska, one of the seven wonders of the natural world. But the next night, the Weather Channel missed predicting snow coming earlier into Denver during the evening rush hour (as did my nifty iPhone). We slid around iced roads with other folks in the dark - again searching for a motel. Dang - gotta do better than this. Southern Arizona here we come!
Overcast skies, rain, sleet, snow, and temps in the lower 50's in Tucson - are we in the right state? Not exactly the weather we had dreamed of for months. But at least no snow on the ground.
When it came time to head home, I plotted out the storms - thank you, Weather Channel. More snow predicted for the Midwest. - but I could work with that. However, we got caught in snow on the Coronado Trail in eastern Arizona, a magnificent 90 mile stretch of road up and over the mountains, a white-knuckle drive through an incedible fairyland of vistas and trees heaped with snow. The next morning, my big guy scraped a good three inches of snow off our car (yes we are still in Arizona). Moving on, we went to the Petrified Forest National Park, where wind was blowing so hard, we could barely stand up. So much for hiking.
In eastern Colorado there was more snow to scrape off the car. But we had missed another big storm - two days before, the motel had been packed with stranded travelers - zero visibility and blizzard conditions. I was getting good at storm-avoidance!
In western Iowa, we followed a monster storm by a couple of days - but the evidence was chilling (pun, pun). They were still hauling out semi trucks that had left the freeway, sometimes tipped on their sides. There were abandoned cars - and many skid marks where cars had left the road. Just like the video clips I'd watched on TV during January and February.
Our experience was nothing like the suffering these storms brought to Chicago and across to the East Coast, where some people are still without adequate housing after Hurricane Sandy. But awareness of extreme weather remains on our minds.
Why aren't more people paying attention? Is it too late to reverse what humans have wrought upon our earth? Are folks right, who say that we should just learn to adapt to these changes?
We are smart people - writing off extreme weather as inevitable does not seem very smart. I want my grandchildren and their children to have a place to live. What will it take to let go of our fatalism and passivity - and begin addressing these very real problems created by climate change?
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