Written Friday, March 16, the first day of Spring Break, on the way back to school from Logan airport at 2 a.m.
The snow has come. Stop kvetching! In Boston's Logan Airport if you did not have the luck of the Irish on Friday, your flight was canceled. Stories circulated: "20 hours in the airport," one lady griped. "Twenty-seven," barked another. All hotels were filled and the traffic was pandemonium. People cried, cursed and laughed at pitiable jokes. (The New York Times recently wrote that humor rarely drives laughter - laughter is more often used to help people fit in, a social mechanism.)
I moved a foot forward, listening to strangers commiserate for hours. Time slowed to a drag as I approached the flight counter. My laptop strap cut into my neck. The flight information screen glowed red:
Canceled. Canceled. Canceled.
The first three hours were quiet, then a baby bawled to my left and on my right, an octogenarian in a Hawaiian print shirt hit the floor. The man's wife had had a heart attack. He had been in the airport since 5 a.m.
It was 5 p.m. when the flight attendant announced, "We are sorry to inform that all flights to Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. ... have been canceled."
Expletives poured from the concourse. A few smiled - recognizing the rare moment when students and 80-year-olds shared a common tongue.
The snow had blitzed everyone's plans: shortened Spring Break, prevented the old man from embracing his wife, the baby from eating. Inclement weather brings everyone down to their simplest human element. It underscores the limits of our control. It parodies the firm grip we think we have on our plans. Five, 10 hours of lifting luggage through the concourse make some hysterical. Others grin, realizing the futility of their arrangements and how impotent our modern conveniences, cars and planes become in a snowstorm.
People shouted into cellular phones on the airport floor and in cabs held up in traffic. In the subway, fury soon metastasized into biting sarcasm, then wit.
"At least we had one success: We made it to the airport!" quipped a man.
A cynical woman answered: "No, the success would have been if we had had the foresight not to get out of bed this morning!"
Cynical woman, softening: "I'm re-routed through Vegas. Maybe if I play the slots during my layover I'll make a million and quit my job!" I wondered what her occupation entailed.
All around people talked in clipped sentences. Then they gushed. The snow had spurred a garrulousness rarely seen among city folk.
People slowed. And the pace seemed healthy - more conducive to sharing. People talked school, work, politics. I liked this pace, a languorous drip more indigenous to West Virginia than Massachusetts.
It's a pity it takes nature to make people comfortable enough to talk on the subway. Any other night the real estate agent with a to-go box of Legal Seafood would not be speaking. Tonight he is engaged in a debate with a pimple-faced teenager.
The snow opened the door for politics and the quotidian affairs of life which we usually keep quiet. And it made us condense our manifold worries into one: getting home.
In the airport and on the subway people yakked because they believed they had a common grief, a shared disgruntlement. In reality the snow simply produced a stretch of time.
Time without driving. Time without flying. Time with busy cell signals. The frenzied atmosphere spurred a casual cordiality. People opened doors left and right, helped carry strangers' luggage. And smiles were effusive.
You walk slower in the snow, drive slower - and don't fly. And, as really snowy weather illustrates, we talk more - at least in the subway.
We think our nation is divided and bifurcated. But maybe it is just isolation, a personal separation and insulation created by the break-neck speed of living. Then comes the snow. Sans cars, trains and planes, talking and the human connection are re-enforced more than at any other time.
Two hours later: the pin-striped real estate agent is still talking to the pimply kid. They are debating universal healthcare. A 20-year-old New Hampshire denizen wearing combat boots talks about his military training camp in Georgia: "It's bad down there. They have the worst weather around."
Everyone palavers about an upcoming election, healthcare crisis, Iraq. Others listen. And all slow down. Before the snow we forgot this mattered.
Paula Kaufman is a freshman who has not yet declared a major.
