The scene wasn’t panicky, really, as the snowflakes began sifting down in earnest. True, the parking lot of the Bethesda hardware store was full, and men and women bustled with more than normal weekday morning urgency. Still, it wasn’t what you’d call an atmosphere of actual alarm. “Excuse me!” a man called in a voice that was both relaxed and purposeful, as he strode past those of us waiting in line for the cashiers.
“Can someone help? I want to buy a snowblower.”
“Coming!” said a fellow who worked in the place, and at that moment, I felt a little explosion by my elbow.
“Pffsfstch,” it went.
Turning, I saw a woman with a face expressive of extreme contempt. She said: “These people are nuts! All rushing in here at the first little hint of snow.”
“Well, some of us” — here, a bit defensively, I indicated the two containers of rock salt I was buying — “are just making up for our lack of preparedness last year.”
She was not mollified. “A snowblower? Pffsfstch,” she said again. “I don’t even have a snowblower in my Michigan house!”
Was it worth mentioning Snowmageddon, and the brisk business enjoyed by area orthopedists afterward? Nah. She had played the Michigan card, and you can’t trump that.
The wussiness of Washingtonians confronted by snowfall is a phenomenon that never fails to amaze those who do not come from here. I don’t come from here, and it certainly amazed me when my husband and I arrived during the Clinton years. I remember us sitting over breakfast in the lobby of our hotel — that’s how recently arrived we were — regarding with laughter and disbelief the scene on local TV. There was Interstate 66, stretching out bare and carless behind the reporter, as a few lazy flakes drifted in front of the camera.
President Obama joined the chorus of incredulity last winter — coming from Chicago, he knows from snow — and he was still talking about it this week when he went to Seattle and read aloud to children who had braved three full inches of the terrifying stuff in order to get to class.
“I’m surprised you guys are in school ’cause a lot of times in Washington people don’t go to school when there’s even an inch of snow,” the president remarked, betraying the apparently universal impulse of transplanted Midwesterners to put psychic distance between themselves and the pantywaists who live around here.
Soon it was late afternoon, suburban roofs and lawns were now prettily frosted and the roads were holy terror. Commuters had begun fleeing downtown at midday — I know this because on a normally tranquil nursery-school run I was nearly run off the road, twice — and, as the sun descended, the Beltway and virtually everything leading to and from it had been wedged into immobility.
“My teacher was so mad today!” a teenager reported that evening. School had been let out early to make the homeward journey less worrying for young drivers, and this filled the teacher with disgust. No points for guessing why: Turns out the teacher is from … Michigan.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
