By now, you’d have to be living under a rock to not be fully informed about the blizzard of snow currently pounding the East Coast. I moved to New Jersey in 2002 and before that I lived in Nebraska, a place also known to get some cold and snow. Nebraskans are a sanguine lot and snow and extreme cold found them firing up their beater car and rolling out on the (unplowed) roads with nary a care. Out there, blowing snow was a given in every snow storm. So when stories of East Coast snow or extreme cold consumed the news, Nebraskans were a combination of bemused and annoyed….you’d think that the East Coast had never experienced a flake, we’d all say, privately concluding that the entire I-95 corridor was populated with candy-assed weaklings.
Fast forward to 2002, when I experienced my first Nor’easter and began to fully understand all the fuss. This kind of storm is no joke. The amount of moisture that can be pulled in to a coastal snowstorm is significant, what with an entire ocean out there. The snow can blow down in sheets, as it is for this storm. Below is the snow on my back deck at 8 am.
And this is before my corner of New Jersey has yet to truly settle in to the weekend’s storm. There’s a lot of shoveling in my future.
That’s not to excuse the media insanity. I can only imagine what the Nebraskans are thinking about us right now as they pull on their work gloves and head out for farm chores with the wind chill in the single digits, “East Coast elite, my ass, not if they panic over a little blowing snow.”
