Oh, *&^$

I can’t bear to say it.

I just got a channel dug to the storm drain, shoveled a path across the yard (!) so that I could reach the hemlocks in the pleasance (one and all prostrate with their top branch-tips mired in snow), de-iced the porch and sidewalk and knocked down some pigsticker-sized icicles, and the whole thing is supposed to happen over again?

I know I have a warped mind, but it makes me think of one of the best pieces of location shooting that ever took place in Washington –  In The Line Of Fire, in which Clint Eastwood plays a Secret Service man who was in the Dallas motorcade behind JFK and is now receiving threatening calls from an aspiring assassin played by John Malkovich.

No, it’s not the threat to repeat a historic event that I think of.

I remember my personal favorite scene from the movie as I look at the boots, gloves, fleece, and snow-sunglasses arrayed along the back of the couch and in front of the heating vents. The scene is the one where Eastwood is about to succumb to a flaring passion for the young agent played by Rene Russo, and just as they are nearly stripped down her walkie-talkie goes off and she has to get to the situation room stat, and Eastwood looks down at the radio and gun and handcuffs and other clanking paraphernalia that he has shed in a metallic crescendo as the two locked lips, and says in a voice of weary resignation:

“Now I have to put all that shit back on.”

Wrestling With Snow Angels

The guy who abandoned his car on my corner showed up around three this afternoon. He turned out to be a neighbor from a block down and over, a thirtysomething with a brushy haircut failing to conceal a slight bald spot and that rudely slim waist and hipbones all the young men seem to sport, boxer shorts peeking coyly above the waist of his slack-tied warmup pants. He had a spade and a bent snow shovel and was doing a decent job, but it went quicker when I dove in as Second Shovel and coached him about breaking the pack ice into fragments with the spade-point.

We got the car free after I’d been pitching in for about a half hour — I’d been at it out there since midmorning and was on autopilot by then anyway. He was touchingly grateful for what I would regard as common decency. Still, I had to turn my head to chuckle when he got into the car, yanked off his stocking cap and fixed his “hat hair” in the rear-view mirror before firing her up. He was so effusive about asking if he could come back and help me with any of my remaining cleanup tomorrow that when he found his street remained impassable, I just let him use the second slab of my driveway overnight. He called me a “lifesaver” so many times I checked to see if I smelled like wintermint.

Speaking of the driveway: not a bad morning’s work for an old broad. After a while it became a matter of finding a place to put the stuff.

Shrubs, not to mention mature trees, that usually stand twice my height were kissing the ground.

How the mirror ornaments remained in place through all that is anyone’s guess.

I couldn’t seem to get a good picture of the twelve-foot spruce that is too close to my treatment room window (but screens it so nicely that I leave it there); because of its asymmetrical haircut, the thing was weighted on the outward facing side and bent like Odysseus’ bow. I have been wanting to top that thing for months so while I had it at my mercy I gave it a good clip, quitting only when I began to sense that my feet were becoming one with the snow. Wool ragg socks make up for the substandard winter boots that are all our Washington Februaries normally call for, but eventually the laws of heat transfer catch up with you.

I gave the whole thing a last look as the sun started to drop and then went inside and reported to my supervisors.

Jotunheim on the Potomac

The western sky finally started clearing around five-thirty — the first blush of real, already fleeing sunlight was confusingly unfamiliar, after only about 36 hours of snow descending from a cardboard-colored sky like flour out of a sifter. I counted at least six damfools who foundered at my corner, a hyperacute turn from a curving downslope that is a made-to-order setup for a wipeout. At least the first of them was good enough to get conclusively stuck facing the wrong way at the curb near my lamppost, which has been a casualty in two previous snowstorms. This way, if anyone else careens out of control, his car will take the hit and I won’t have a prone lamppost across my front walk or a pickup truck on my lawn.

The car is the faintly visible feature just to the left of the base of the lamppost. I dug its windshield out once to make sure no one was unconscious inside and then left it alone; snow swallowed it up again.

Owing to battery failure in the first camera I took out, I didn’t get a shot of the bushes prostrate across the general area of the sidewalk and hugging the fire hydrant. This is usually a four-lane thoroughfare, a primary County road an hour’s quick-march from the White House.

Shoveling is a droning chore, but disinterring bushes that have been plastered to the ground by a foot-plus of wet snow gives the whole thing a Dungeons-and-Dragons like zest. It is somewhere in between wrestling a Frost Giant and a colossal squid.

In this shot the bushes close to the house have already been liberated. I was less thorough with the ones at the property perimeter, but made sure they weren’t going to swoon to the sidewalk level again and fill the trench I’d dug.

Roofs collapsed here and there around the region, power went out in splats to the south and north of town, low-pressure troughs gave us the rare phenomenon of “thundersnow” (and made me close to puke along about ten last night, about while I was helping a couple of 20somethings dig out an oversize pickup jammed athwart my street, but I guess they could have handled it).

There is a reason our Nordic ancestors (well, mine, anyway) imagined the world’s end as a merciless winter, three winters in fact, piled up end to end with no intervening summer. We can imagine ourselves safe in our hives, but we are only a few yards away from death when the gods send this to us — separated by the two quantum leaps of human ingenuity and human decency. Let those fail, and night falls.

O bird of bitter cruelty,
Southward over the snow
Bear your burden of cold death:
Go, sweeting, go.

The earth’s smoke and fire
And the breath of all things
Falls expiring, extinguished
Beneath your wings.

All life’s foolish passion –
The child at the breast,
The lover by his sweetheart
Pleased or distressed,

The soldier in his conquest,
The tyrant in his state,
All, all their ambition
Make desolate.

End all, all:
Still rivers and seas,
Make glass of the hillsides
And the leafless trees:

In the wind of your pinions
Let the deep drifts blow:
Beyond that, silence:
Go, darling, go.

Someone From South Dakota Should Know Better

I predicted there would be problems in DC because there are so many people who think they’re too important to change their plans for a piffling foot or two of blowing snow.

Someone is going to get a merciless ribbing.

A FOX 5 crew was broadcasting live cell phone video on the air when they spotted former South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle pushing his car down a snowy street in Northwest Washington on Friday night, February 5, 2010.

Fmr. Sen. Tom Daschle Stuck in D.C. Snowstorm

TV crew spots Daschle pushing car down DC street

Updated: Friday, 05 Feb 2010, 10:24 PM EST
Published : Friday, 05 Feb 2010, 10:24 PM EST

By MYFOXDC STAFF/myfoxdc

While FOX 5 was busy covering the start of the Blizzard of 2010 in D.C. on Friday night, our reporters came across a number of stranded vehicles—but one stood out from the rest.

As reporter Matt Ackland and his photographer Nelson Jones were driving down Wisconsin Avenue in Upper Northwest D.C. while they were live on the air, they spotted a man trying to push his car out of the snow. When they stopped to help—live on the air—they found that it was none other than former South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle.

Daschle’s car was stuck along the roadway, but Jones hopped out to help him push.

Of course, D.C. officials have been urging residents not to venture out onto the road in the treacherous conditions, but apparently Daschle had somewhere to be. There’s no word on where he was headed.

Let Me Tell You About Snow

Given the snowstorm bearing down on us (see last post), I’m doing my bit as an Obnoxious Area Native to tell all the transient people around here what the Washington DC area knows from snow.

This page has a rundown of the area’s snow history. Scroll down to the second half of the “20th Century Winters” category; except for the storm recorded in 1953, a smidge over a year before I was born, I saw all of them.

Nothing beat the Blizzard of 1966.

January 30-31, 1966: The “Blizzard of 1966″ struck Washington and the Northeast U.S. One to two feet of snow covered a large part of Virginia and Maryland: Fredericksburg – 15.5 inches; Manassas – 13 inches; Washington – 14 inches (added to a previous snow, the depth on the ground came to 20 inches); and Baltimore – 12 inches. Intense blowing and drifting snow continued and kept roads closed for several more days crippling transportation lines and causing a food shortage and rationing.

I admit I didn’t take it in and can’t tell you what was rationed and how. “Snow up to your crotch” made a far more vivid impression.

My cat at the time didn’t like it much either.

Those are our porch railings, three steps above ground level, after the snow had had a couple of days to drift and settle and we felt like it was all right to let her understand why she hadn’t been allowed out through all that time. She shook her paws for half an hour after coming in from a few minutes’ exploration.

What the “Great Furlough Storm of 1996″ entry doesn’t mention is that after three days under three feet of snow and packed ice, thawing and refreezing every night, the morning temperature on the Friday of the first week soared to 65 degrees. I was running down the bike path in my jog bra with my jacket and jersey tied around my waist, uttering sharp whoops at the delirium of it. Just as I was about to commence my day’s work an hour later, I looked down the cellar stairs and discovered that the foundation drains, clear and operating, were pouring thaw into an outside-stairwell main drain that had been blocked by something during all that thawing and refreezing. The water was accumulating in the stairwell at the rate of about a gallon a minute and had already risen half way across the gently banked cellar floor.

I stood in that motherf*&%ing stairwell for four hours ankle deep in thaw, with a bucket, scooping and heaving the relentless water over my head onto the packed dirt under the porch. It took about a cubic yard of dirt to eventually fill in the gully I created. The county arrived with a compressor around three in the afternoon, pumped everything clear and fished out the block created by the terra-cotta drainpipe swallowing a piece of itself and then silting up.

There’s a reason I lift heavy things every day.

Later that evening the saturated ground poured water over Canal Road between Key Bridge and Chain Bridge, stranding about one Mercedes-driving Yuppie per quarter-mile along its nonexistent shoulder as the temperature plunged like a paralyzed falcon and created an obstacle-course of ice slicks. I saw them, standing in their Burberries beside their spun-out cars, glumly cell-phoning home to say they’d be late for dinner. I had just dropped off my then husband at a production of The Pirates of Penzance, in his pirate suit, and my little Civic dodged between the rinks somehow, getting me home to a large cup of brandied java about the time the curtain was due to go up. History does not record how many attended the performance.

Bloody Idiots

It’s going to snow.

It’s going to snow a lot, as we’ve been told incessantly for the last three days, so every man jack in the DC area has run out to buy bread and toilet paper. This happens every goddam time.

Now, I would say that of the people in that line (click the photo for a better gander at how far back it goes), everyone has a fridge and a freezer and cupboards. Everyone has running water and a stove. Everyone could squirrel a couple loaves of bread in the freezer and maybe a quart of milk, everyone could keep cans of stuff in the pantry, everyone could reserve a twelve-pack of Marcal somewhere in the storage areas of the house. So why the fuck is it that as soon as there is even a flake of snow predicted, much less two feet (the Midwest is laughing at us, but it’s a lot) everyone joins a feeding frenzy at the local Giant?

In Florida this happens with water and batteries when a hurricane is imminent. Maybe it’s some sort of herding instinct.

Back in my days of writing a local newspaper column, I once vented my exasperation about this sort of behavior. Some little old lady (self-identified as such) wrote to chastise me for failing to understand how old bones can break in icy parking lots.

Unless old brains can’t figure out the simple concept “keep two or three days worth of food in the cupboard and don’t touch it unless you are snowed in,” I stand by my position.

None of those people in the grocery look too old to me.

Liberal Arts

If anyone doubts that stories matter — or has not happened to tune into the PBS News Hour this week — I offer this. It is remarkable.

Wednesday on the NewsHour: Using Drama to Understand and Heal the Wounds of War

Posted by Tom LeGro , February 3, 2010

A dramatic performance project called ‘Theater of War’ uses ancient Greek tragedies for a very special goal: To link ancient and modern warriors in an understanding of war’s pain and mental agony.

Wednesday on the NewsHour, Jeffrey Brown talks to the artists, mental health professionals and soldiers who have been involved and who see the healing potential of theater for soldiers and veterans returning from combat…

There are more video clips at the headline link.

People used to ask me sometimes why anyone would get an expensive undergraduate degree in something as useless as literature, especially literature (as a lot of my classes involved) written in languages that no one speaks any more, and that I can’t even follow very competently myself.

It’s good when someone has an answer like this.

Tunes That Run In Your Head

I hate it when I’ve been humming a tune for half an hour and I realize it’s one I wrote.

Where did my inner lieder composer/opera-scribe-wannabe/coffeehouse performer go?

I’ve got a nylon six-string in the corner of my living room, a spinet in the basement and an electronic keyboard that too-kind friends picked out for me last Christmas, the last hooked up to the computer, and my forearm muscles are too farblondjet from wringing out four and five bodies a day to enjoy playing them, that’s where.

Dammit.

Most often, I catch myself murmuring “The Night The Lights Went Out In College Hall,” which, with a nod to “The Ball of Ballynoor,” kept me from going crazy when I worked as an administrative assistant at the local college. This was, at the time, a Catholic institution of higher education for working teachers, nursing- and business-folk, and children of naive devout parents who didn’t realize that their cosseted daughters were setting a beeline course for the bars and abortion clinics of Washington D. C. as soon as they got well settled in their dormitories.

I used to clock four-milers on my lunch hour (we are casting our minds back to 1983 here, begorrah) and polish the limerick-metre verses as I speedwalked:

Some say it was liquor, the staff inclines to dope,
Some say Bill Brock’s encounter group had turned into a grope
(Bill* was a New Agey gestaltey touchey feeley guy on the Psychology faculty. I got some priceless reading recommendations from him, but he used to answer his phone in a smarmy dulcet uplilt that made him sound like a twat.)
The nuns all called it Original Sin
But all I know is there’s never been
An orgy like that night in College Hall.

*Names have been changed to protect the innocent, or guilty, from search engines.

Charles Cook was in his office, and I’m told he was asleep
Charles was the fellow who interviewed me for my job, and a decent chap.
And dreaming he was safely out at Airlie counting sheep
Airlie Plantation was where the college used to have retreats and conferences and things in a bucolic setting in the Virginny hills.
When they knocked on his door and said “Join in!”
He just called out for more lanolin
And never got it on in College Hall.

The nuns beheld the ribaldry exposed beneath their view
Mirella said “Forgive them, for they know not what they do!”
Sister Mirella was the college President, frequently mentioned as the longest tenured college President after the mook who headed up Notre Dame, for whatever that was worth.
But one of the sisters with keener sight
Said “It looks to me like they’re doing all right,
No amateurs down there in College Hall.”

It was one for all and all for one and sometimes two for three
In every combination you could ever wish to see
The College Infirmary filled by turns
With sprains and strains and friction burns
Sustained upon that night in College Hall.

Eric from Security went down to check the fuss
We had a zealous young-Turk head of Security who wanted to be on the cover of Time.
And the state in which we found him was too frightful to discuss
With a Denver Boot locked onto his knees
They were going at him in twos and threes
In the parking lot in front of College Hall.

Security was always zealous about parking enforcement.

Sam Levey came to rescue him — he thought it was a fight –
And he stood and issued tickets just as fast as he could write,
Saying “Pardon me boss, that girl’s in pain,
I think you’re parked in her exit lane,
You can’t do that in front of College Hall.”

Sam was a Security veteran and he looked like a Sam Levey — balding and hook-nosed, with a patriarchal paunch and eternally disapproving gaze.

John Hare was heard exclaiming as he nibbled at his nails,
Dr. Hare was the Chaucer professor in the neglected Arts department, and a timorous reedy thing.
“This must be what they were doing in the Canterbury Tales!“
And they found him at last in the morning light
With his clothes in rags and his hair turned white
Beneath the Exit light in College Hall.

There were tons of other verses, ending up with:

The dawn revealed some students in a catatonic state,
John Landi with a profit of a dollar ninety-eight
John was one of our grad assistants and thought well of himself.
A camera van with the hubcaps gone,
A Dominican priest with no cassock on
And this writing on the wall,
“Good God, we had a ball
The night the lights went out in College Hall.”

One morning I parked in the north lot of the campus, scuffed up a pair of lacy panties from the asphalt on the way in to my office, and push-pinned them to the department bulletin board with a scrawled note: “Are these yours?”

I probably shouldn’t think about my past if I can avoid it.

Home Sweet Home Depot

Not.

Despite the bargains, despite the incredible you-need-it-we-got-it laden shelves, despite the little promotions with the motto “My Toy Store,” I have yet to meet anyone who really likes contending with the Home Depot hardwarehouse. Yes, you can go there with a list that includes everything from bungee cords to bundled lumber to bathtubs to terra-cotta rabbits, but before you leave with your list ticked off and change in your wallet you have to go through an experience that is somewhere in between swarming a cactus and screwing a moose. It never gets any better.

For a while it was the life-in-your-hands sensation connected with having a semi-oblivious Depotante cruising up the aisle behind you on a beeping forklift. Someone got the idea this was putting people off and it stopped happening. Then you couldn’t find help when you needed to ask a question, to the point the term “pumpkin patch” entered the corporate vernacular, denoting a huddle of orange-aproned Home Depot sales assistants hiding from customers in a remote corner of the store.  Now we seem to have embarked on a New Era Of Customer Relations, and you can’t walk in the place without being accosted and mugged with solicitude. Have you found everything you wanted? Do you know about the benefits of our credit card? They wear repellent little green-lettered badges asking “Are we a 10 in customer assistance today?” Gaah.

I was trying to buy two gallons of paint, some light bulbs, and a few other odds and ends and found myself desperately fending off a middle-aged gentleman with an earnest, exophthalmic and disturbingly blinkless gaze, who started out thinking I was a contractor (I think it was my oh-so-butch Duluth Workwear cell phone holster) and wanted to sign me up for a commercial account. I explained I was not but he really wanted to be my friend and continued enumerating the Benefits Of A Commercial Account until I shoved up my sleeve and pantomimed shock, saying I needed to meet my house painter in half an hour. Nothing of the sort was the case but I had to get away before he made me an offer of marriage. This was easier said than done because the place is a horrendous maze of towering shelves and no sight-lines, and every time you think you are at the aisle you want you find yourself back at the same disturbing eye-level display of low-flush toilets.

I was all the way home before I remembered I wanted some glue. I think I’ll go to the five and dime. One of the surviving twelve or twenty in the entire nation (I sometimes think) is a few miles away and sometimes I just go there to look at a store that is small enough for me to wrap my head around.

It could have been worse. The last time something like this happened was when I bought a new front door in 2003 and the Home Depot door guy took my business card after describing the pains in his neck. A couple of weeks later he sent me an e-mail, not inquiring about appointment times but telling me his dog’s newest favorite joke (he was very specific that it came from the dog) and asking if there would be a good time to come around and see my new door. I didn’t answer. I don’t like dogs.

G Whiz, Officer

Renal Failure recently blogged this matter, so I risk being regarded as a cheesy imitator, but then, how often is it that a whole gender gets told by a bunch of condescending scientists that they are only imagining their bodily experiences?

Um… pretty often in history, actually. We could be here all night. Instead I yield the floor to Dr. Susan Block:

How did Drs. Burri and Spector reach their snarky, international, headline-screaming conclusion that the G-spot is “probably a myth,” a “fiction” virtually forced upon innocent, G-spotless women by nefarious “magazines and sex therapists”? They did a survey of 1,804 British female twins aged 23-83 who answered questionnaires about whether or not they had G-spots. Or thought they had them. Or could find them. Or enjoy them. Or something. What a way to run a treasure hunt.

It just goes to reinforce my commonsense observation that scientists, far from being necessarily as objective as they’d like you to believe, are like other human beings — a mixed bag, some of them captive to social preconceptions and/or their own neuroses, some of them able to wade in (why does every metaphor I use end up sounding suggestive here?) and come to grips (dammit) with the realities in a sincerely curious and constructive way.

There was a time — does anyone remember it? — when doctors debated whether women’s menstrual cramps were real, or whether they were a psychosomatic manifestation of women’s discomfort with their own sexuality. Seriously. This was discussed with a straight face in “Soon You’ll Be A Woman” pamphlets that were floating around when I was a kid. My health teacher in seventh grade explained what masturbation was and said it wasn’t a good idea to do too much of it because then you wouldn’t be satisfied with your husband. I had a client whose first child came rocketing out projectile-style into the lap of a completely unprepared obstetrician, who had been telling Mom all through her pregnancy that, as a marathon runner, she could expect a long, miserable labor and “we’ll be here all night.” There is no end to the malarkey that “experts” have uttered about human bodies, especially women’s.

Some women just naturally do the G thing. Some don’t. Some don’t and then find it happening, or decide to learn how and dig it. How hard is that for science to understand? Are we really on the edge of a precipice if we start a light-of-day conversation about what people do with their genitalia (and what their genitalia do with them)?

Leave it to Dr. Suzy to settle the matter sensibly. Which, of course, requires grappling directly with the sexual subject of inquiry, something that is still, in this allegedly enlightened century, Not Safe For Work Or Newspapers Or (apparently) Research Grants.