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Wednesday, January 20, 1999 By Samantha Bennett
This is the time of year when most of us wonder what on earth can possibly be keeping us here. I know I do. I wonder every year at this time. And I hardly ever have any really compelling answers, but I stay anyway. I'm either strong, lazy or just dumb as a box of hair.
By "here" I don't mean Pittsburgh specifically. Pittsburgh, weatherwise, is not that much worse than anyplace else I've ever lived. I mean "here" in the northeastern United States, where the blink-and-you-miss-it glory of autumn is followed by the brutal vindictiveness of a winter that lasts about six months.
My Pennsylvania childhood memories include many picturesque winter scenes. In most of them, our car is parked down at the bottom of our street because we can't get it up the hill. I trudge forth to wait for the bus in the darkness, punching through the ice layer on top of the snow and cutting my bare legs on it - which I fortunately cannot feel, because the slashing wind has numbed my skin. Strangely, I don't remember much about all the sledding I did in Valley Forge Park ("Get snow down your pants where your patriot forebears froze!") except for my dad informing me that I was cold and it was time to go home.
In New England, where I lived for a number of years, the natives are very fond of boasting about how capricious the weather is. "If you don't like the weathuh," they'll say in that Pepperidge-Fahm-remembahs cackle, "just wait a minute, and it'll change."
Mostly what I remember from my time there, though, is the weather not changing. The weather seemed inclined to do the same thing for days, maybe weeks, at a time and it was hardly ever something I approved of.
Up north, they had snow. You could always tell. No matter what kind of winter ferocity we were getting in Connecticut, you would always get passed on I-91 by a car with New Hampshire plates that had clearly been driven through an avalanche that was perhaps augmented by some kind of volcanic eruption. You wondered how the driver could see through the windows, which were pasted over with road salt, ice, tar, ash, muesli, who knows what.
But down in coastal Connecticut, we got a lot of ice. My most cherished memory of New England's winter charm has nothing to do with snow falling softly on cozy little villages with church steeples sticking up out of them. It is of my bloodless fingers gripping a scraper that I flailed over my laminated car, as freezing rain driven by wind off Long Island Sound stung my face and trickled down my neck. It was after midnight. I had just finished my shift at the paper where I worked. My wipers were frozen to the windshield and my hair was freezing across my forehead. I looked through my watering eyes over at a colleague, who was similarly occupied, and called out the sort of hearty encouragement New Englanders offer each other in winter.
"AAAAAAAAA!!" I brayed into the gale. "Why do we live here?? I hate us!"
I invite any of my New England readers enjoying this column on the Web - hi, Karen - to visit Pittsburgh for the weather. Now, we have capricious weather! We have weather that dares to go beyond capricious, through surrealist into Dada and then on to just plain unsportsmanlike. Days that begin at 50 degrees and end in a blizzard. Days when the streets fill with rain because the drains are full of snow. Blistering hot days that sizzle out in a rush-hour thunderstorm, followed by a chill that drives everyone indoors with goose bumps. Run that up your steeple and see how hardy you are, Yankee!
These are the times that try men's souls, not to mention their car batteries. I've had snow down my boots, sleet down my shirt and slush over the sides of my shoes. My heart sinks when I awake to the rasping arrhythmia of scrapers or the whine of cretins spinning their wheels. (I would have included the chain-jingling rumble of a plow, but it's OK, I never hear that.)
Why do I stay? Well, how can one truly appreciate the return of the sun if it never goes away? After we survive this, won't spring be sweet?
Nah, you're right. It will probably mostly be muddy.
Samantha Bennett can be reached by e-mail at sbennett@post-gazette.com.
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