The Ice Pirates Are Coming!

It’s only raining now. I didn’t have to wear my horrible hiking clothes to work today, and I only wore one hat (that I made on Tuesday, woo!). I still slept under four blankets last night but not in my polarfleece bathrobe…what I did sleep in, of course, is none of your business. I left the house at my normal time this morning and arrived at work the usual thirty to forty minutes later. All these things are radically different from the past two days, thanks for asking.

There was this big snowstorm in Seattle on Tuesday. Steely-eyed Midwesterners will laugh with abandon when they learn that there was a snowfall of five inches and that it essentially shut the city down, but this little Floridiana was stymied by the whole thing. It wasn’t like a couple of months ago when there was a little dusting of snow up by my house but it had melted by the time I got home from work that day. The snow on Tuesday was coming on down and not stopping and the radio said that everything was closing (except where I work, of course) and for heaven’s sake, don’t drive or anything today. Actually, what the radio said was for people to telecommute, which I found very funny today, like NPR just thinks everyone who listens to them has a telecommutable job, for some reason. “Um, yeah, hi, boss? I’ll be folding sweaters at the Gap from home today.” The radio also said for people to pack food and water and blankets in their cars, if you can imagine such a thing, in case they got stuck in traffic and had to wait a while for the roads to clear. And in case the roaming bands of wild-eyed snow gypsies were out marauding that day, looking for fresh victims, right? Who can be bought off with Luna Bars? That was clearly the subtext.

But who am I kidding, that’s exactly what I did when I finally ventured out, having decked myself in my horrible teal long underwear from 1995, my not-so-horrible fuzzy pants, two pairs of socks, a regular sweater, a polarfleece sweater, pea coat, scarf, gloves, and two hats. I’d had a fraught conversation with my boss that morning along the “Are you going in? Well, if you’re going to go then I’ll probably go. But don’t, if you don’t want to, go in. Or you could go in, and maybe I’ll go in too. Okay, see you there.” I thought I should at least make the gesture, as I’d been late my first day back from my vacation because of a car battery situation and I didn’t want to be some sort of slacker employee who stays at home and drinks hot chocolate and listens to dire warnings on NPR (“Beware the ice pirates! They will stop at nothing!”). The snow was very light and dry and I managed to brush it off all the car windows, only to notice that they were covered again by the time I was done. I eaaaaaaaaased out the driveway and made my trepidatious way down the street, whimpering the whole time: “A week ago I was home and it was eighty-five degrees! Eighty to the five, man! This is unfair! I don’t have a snow brush or anything! What if the white wolves get me?”

It was so quiet. There were hardly any cars out and the snow was still falling so there were no ruts in the roads or anything. I made it to the park and ride…because clearly, I needed to park where I always park on the snow day and not spend the eight dollars to park near her office, right? That’s me, the thrifty Floridian who waited for the bus for a good forty minutes, checking the sky (“Yup! Still coming down!”) and wondering if she should just walk to work, avalanches be damned. Paying for parking didn’t cross my mind once. Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait for the bus. I finally walked up to another bus stop a few blocks away and managed to squeeze on to one going my way, wherein I discovered the strange sort of camaraderie that occasionally happens when there are weather-related disasters. People were joking and talking on the bus, which was nice, because I was practically spooning with the guy next to me and it’s always nice to get to know someone with whom you may be inadvertently exchanging bodily fluids due to the machinations of public transit physics. The bus driver let people squeeze on at every stop, warning them that he didn’t know how far he was going to make it but they were welcome to ride as long as they could. We saw several cars that had slid onto sidewalks and there were a lot of people falling down.

I only stayed at work for a couple of hours, in all my sweaters and hats. I had to walk part of the way back to the park and ride and people were still walking around talking to each other and telling what they’d heard on the radio about how it was worse in some places and the drifts were ankle-high by now! That’s what it was like after the hurricane in Miami for the first couple of weeks, except there was a lot more light construction work going on and it was much, much hotter. People would just walk around in the streets, talking about how they’d heard that plywood sheets were going for fifty dollars down in Homestead and that bags of ice were going for twenty. Most of the time I don’t mind going about my business in relative anonymity and I certainly don’t like to talk to strangers on the bus, but there is something sort of endearing and even exciting about being shaken out of the ordinary a little, about comparing stories and feeling as though you’ve braved something big. This is all even better when the thing you’re braving isn’t that big of a deal, because you get all the hearty backslapping and we’ll-get-through-this-together-mates feelings without having to be in real danger or even really inconvenienced.

I made it home quite well Tuesday and talked to my mom on the phone, assuring her that I wouldn’t be driving at night. Yesterday it had stopped snowing and started with the freezing rain, thereby sealing my car in a sheet of ice, thereby causing me to be late again. And now it’s just gray and overcast as always in Seattle this time of year. Soon the snow will all have melted passive-aggressively away and maybe it will be spring in a couple of months, and I’ll have forgotten that funny feeling of braving the not-really-so-difficult-elements once again.


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