Should have kept quiet about that easy El Nino winter. Shouldn’t have clucked about the mudslides in L.A., the tornadoes in Florida and how, for once, it was our turn, in the Mild Middle, to put away the snow shovels and get with the seed catalogs.
But no-o-o-o. Had to be a little smug. Had to tempt Mother Nature, the Goddess of Gale, into reminding us who’s boss. How soon we do forget.
So how did she choose to reassert her dominion? With a classic snowstorm? A rainy deluge and flood? High winds followed by a freeze?
No such luck. So miffed was she that she summoned all three. From Wadsworth to Whiting, from Waukegan to Warrenville, the Chicago region was lambasted Monday morning with, well. . . . What was that stuff anyway?
They called it snow at Midway Airport, where nearly a foot of it landed (which is more than could be said of the day’s scheduled arrivals.) But it wasn’t snow, really. It was winged slush, flying sideways, sticking to the north side of just about everything.
It stuck to electricity lines, setting them up for the snap. At one point almost the entire suburb of Skokie was in the dark. It stuck to railroad switches, jamming them this way and that. By mid-morning there were two kinds of commuters aboard stalled Metra trains, those who had cell phones and those who needed to borrow cell phones.
Maybe it was the trees that got it worst, and not just the big one that fell across the Skokie Swift tracks, halting service all day. They died with their buds on, for they, like we, had allowed themselves to be fooled.
Horns were honked, of course, and meetings missed. Major highways were blocked out west, in Kane and De Kalb Counties, and even in close, when Lake Michigan reclaimed, for a day, parts of Lake Shore Drive. But there were a million small kindnesses, too, from shared cabs to “you steer and I’ll push.”
It was a day to feel how interconnected we are–how you can’t pump gasoline when the power is out . . . but some stranger might just give you a ride.
Most of all, it was a day to remind us who’s boss.
