Congratulations to those of us who survived this most recent Storm of the Century; Stormageddon, the Snowpocalypse, the latest, biggest, baddest threat to life as we know it … or something like that.
We confess to having a rather perverse liking for really foul weather, possibly because of the way bad weather insists on rewriting the best-laid plans. We humans like to think we have a leg up, what with our mastery of fire and the wheel and whatnot, but we are fooling ourselves.
Nature is the ultimate 800-pound gorilla that, as the old joke goes, sits and eats wherever and whenever it wants. We can feel about it as we may.
Mainers are renowned for enduring famously bad weather with a taciturn “P’shaw. T’weren’t nothin’,” but behind that nonchalance is a well-earned respect for what nature can do, honed by generations enduring it.
Such dispassion flies in the face in the face of our modern communications age where everything is literally the latest or greatest or best or worst or most liked or most hated. We’d hate to think we are getting jaded, but if you treat everything as a threat to life and limb, after a while the real threats start blending into the scenery, and that is truly dangerous.
If you remember, in 2012, after Hurricane Sandy failed to deliver the thorough butt-kicking Mainers were promised, there was significant grumbling regarding the dire warnings issued ahead of the storm.
Hurricane Sandy was supposed to be another threat to all we hold dear, but by the time the hurricane arrived in Vacationland it was largely degraded to high winds and some rain.
That storm, like this one, promised much and delivered little, but we got lucky. This time around, if the air had been a little warmer and the snow a little wetter and heavier, cleanup this week would be an entirely different thing.
