I am getting really tired of this winter. If there is going to be a snowstorm, bring it on! Give us your best shot Mother Nature, we can take it! Enough with these six-inch storms, we want a real storm, one that cancels classes and locks us in our dorms for a day or two. Tufts students have so many talents waiting to be brought out by a major snowstorm. The moderate accumulation of this week ignited some of the Jumbos' creativity, but there is more creativity waiting to be aroused.
Despite the disappointment of failing to get the possible foot of snow, I was proud of my fellow students for making the most out of our comparatively measly six inches this week. What did my peers do with the heavy and wet snow? They threw it at each other and rolled in it, and then they built giant snow penises and snow breasts. What imagination! Penises made of snow! Boobs made of snow! Amazing!
Now, just think what these people could have done with 25 inches of snow. What a giant penis that would have made! Ah to think, I could have walked out of my dorm and been confronted not with an eight-foot schlong, but a 20-foot one next to a breast the size of Haskell Hall! Think of the publicity that such a storm will bring to the University. Instead of covering the highways and the airport, the news crews would flock to Tufts to get a shot of the giant snow genitalia.
How amazing it could have been! But all for not, my friends. You can't make genital sculptures with rain or sleet, but perhaps we should learn how. It seems that so far this winter we have been getting shortchanged in comparison to the rest of southern New England.
Tufts is cursed. We Jumbos seem to be destined never to experience a true "heavy" snowfall, and are instead sentenced to a lifetime of hyped up six-inch snowfalls. As a friend of mine said yesterday, "Andrew, don't you know, it doesn't snow in Boston anymore! It snows in that twilight zone between routes 128 and 495, get used to it." My reaction to him was, "It didn't used to be that way, and it better not stay that way."
As a weather forecaster, I know that storm tracks are largely random, and that one day our time will come to get blasted with over a foot of snow. The meteorological part of my brain understands the complexities of New England weather. As James Carville would say if he were a weather forecaster: It's the ocean, stupid. The same warm ocean waters that provide the fuel for a Nor'Easter can turn a snowstorm into a slushy mess in a matter of minutes. A wind shift of just 20 degrees on a compass will change the snow to rain, or rain to snow. Tufts is located in a precarious spot for snowstorms, just five miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean. I know all this, and yet I can't help but be suspicious and envious of all the communities who have been getting slammed by the white stuff so far this winter season. And in my heart, I am worried that this pattern is here to stay.
The snowstorm that hit campus this week is a perfect example. The storm passed 40 miles too close to campus, a tiny distance in the vast expanse of the atmosphere, thereby keeping us too mild for snow at the beginning, and keeping us too close to the center of the storm for heavy snow after we finally did cool down. Sure our six inches were beautiful, and I enjoyed every minute of it, but think of this: only an hour's drive to the northwest they were digging out from 15, 20, even 30 inches of snow! (For the record, Jaffrey, New Hampshire recorded 34 inches of snow.) That could have been us but for a measly little shift in the jet stream. A puny easterly nudge from the upper airflow is all it would have taken for us to be in the bullseye.
We could also have used a friendly, cold high-pressure system to our north to keep the low-level cold air funneling down the coastline. What we got instead was a "chicken" high that booked it offshore at the first sign of a storm, turning our winds easterly rather than northeasterly. That high should be indicted in a meteorological courtroom. The end result was that fellow snow lovers and I had to watch the serious action on television as correspondents braved whiteout conditions and measured the snowdrifts by yardsticks. I had to endure the anchor saying, "Well, at least it is not that bad in the city." As a weatherman, I am thrilled by all types of weather, particularly stormy weather, and the absolute worst thing that someone can say to me is that they are glad that the storm missed us.
On Monday evening, while communities to the north and west of Tufts were experiencing a rare phenomenon called "thundersnow," we were being treated to a light sleet and snow mixture that was hardly accumulating. Even people who don't like "bad" weather can admit that lightning and thunder while it is snowing at two inches per hour is quite exciting.
As with most issues, however, I have mixed feelings over the most recent lackluster blockbuster. Many more lives would have been lost if the storm had done what I wanted it to do. The fact is that the first forecasts for snow were not issued until Saturday, a mere 48 hours before the onset of the storm, and at that time no one (including myself) could specify amounts. Even on Monday afternoon, the National Weather Service was predicting 8-15 inches for areas that wound up with 30 inches!
A nightmare scenario nearly played out - Boston came within 50 miles of receiving an historic amount of snow, on the very anniversary of the city's benchmark snowstorm, The Blizzard of 1978. What would have been the result if Boston instead of Jaffrey, NH had received over 30 inches in 24 hours? How many lives would have been lost in the surprise blizzard? These are questions that must be asked by emergency planners and weather forecasters alike, and they help me to come to grips with the melting six inches outside my window. Ok, we missed the brunt of this one, and we got rain in the New Year's storm, but next time around it will be our turn. Won't it? In the meantime, I am going to practice some sculpting.
