Hey, that’s not the Great Lake out there, its the northern Pacific Ocean.
Goldy’s whining over the last couple of days about the no-snow-snow-closures in Seattle reminds me how odd it is for the state’s most popular liberal blogger (can anyone tell me that he isn’t) to not really get the region he’s writing about.
No matter how easy it would be understand how different Seattle and many Puget Sound cities are from most east coast cities both in terms of climate and topography, he just seems to gripe that we don’t react to snow storms the way those hardened east coasters do.
We remember when we don’t take these things seriously because:
Our kindergardener daughter was stuck at Kimball all day, and had to eat Fruit Loops, a great topic of subsequent conversation. Her school bus dropped her off on 19th at 10 PM. Fortunately she found her way home (we’d been alerted by phone to await her a block away!).
And:
In 1990, I was living in the north end and working in Ballard. I left work when the snow began to stick (not a good tactic) and made it to about a mile from my mother’s house, got stuck on a hill, got help from helpful people to get my car safely parked without hitting any other vehicles, then walked the rest of the way to pick up my four-month-old.
We stayed at my mom’s until the power went out, and then we bundled up the baby and walked 10 blocks to my house. My husband was driving home from the Eastside and arrived at two in the morning.
Since we don’t get wall to wall snow, we don’t prepare for big storms. We just let them happen and assume the few days at home won’t hurt us too much. But, we’re also more cautious about going out, since we know we’re not prepared.
The stories of the 1990 storm reminded me of another snow related incident a year earlier. The late King County prosecutor’s, Norm Maleng, daughter was killed in 1989 in a sledding accident.
Those kinds of accidents are not uncommon, but going from the a notorious snow death in 1989 to kids being stuck in schools in 1990, probably keeps decision makers more trigger happy to keep kids indoors.
I wasn’t here in ’90, but I remember the Big Freeze of ’96, when I lived in Tacoma. My sister who lived in Port Angeles was down for Christmas and had to get back entirely by public transit. (In sneakers w/out socks, no less.) IIRC she stayed overnight in Port Townsend at a bus driver’s house.
My little apartment lost power, and I walked in the middle of the night to a friend’s place. The sound of the creaking cracking snapping branches all through the Stadium District was entirely freaky.
Chad was living in some rental way out in the boonies south of Olympia, and I think he was w/out power for 2 weeks. (This was before we met.)
It’s his take that this week is probably the biggest snow storm that I’ve been in, what with growing up in LA.