Winter in Buffalo

The question is always the same:

"Buffalo New York? How could anyone live with all that snow?"

"That's why they live there," you always reply.

If there is anything that characterizes the Western dog-nose of the New York State shape more than high-ranging annual snowfall, it is bureaucratic incompetence, greed and corruption, the inability of a post-NAFTA economy to get some wind back in its lungs.

Recall, now, the winter of 2001-2002, when somewhere in the range of 7 feet fell on Erie County in a matter of days. For you to return to the iceberg region, having spent the holiday in warmer climes, was something like being slingshot to the moon in a sleeping bag: streets were silent save for the gravel crunch slushing and backwards beeps of the county snow blowers, 15-foot white walls cordoned avenues from storefronts, and a wicked silver light shown through the half trees at the park, where divots the depth of human bodies plummeted to the frozen tundra far below.

And inside, the people.

Inside their rancid wood duplexes and old stone houses and 70s-themed cement skyscrapers, the people were given over to modest activities. TV-watching. Tea-drinking. Rice-eating. With so many continents of snowfall standing between home and food service station, apartment complex and neighborhood bar, decadence was an afterthought: There is no drunkenness, no expensive cheese and no wine parties when your means of transportation have all been sealed shut in a frigid glue of dagger flakes.

But there was contemplation. A vast silence filled the void of non-life, with orange clouds whispering overhead and a deadly chill assaulting the few brave lips of those who went to walk in the liberated thoroughfares.
The occasional one-man armada of a tank-like road service vehicle would sometimes break the white freezerburn with a heatless explosion of urgent yellow lights, but mostly, we were cold.

And this was when the real things emerged.

When you were on your last slice of store-bought bread, when the last of the Labatt six-pack had dripped its way past your chattering teeth, when the realities depicted on TV and the surrealities depicted in the books you read no longer dealt with the prevalence of the uniform frigidity outside, you shut them off and shelved them and looked out the window, out at the six-inch triangle of unsteamed glass where the still birch branches grazed the bowing power lines and the circle-webs of ice lit by the streetlights stared back at you like they knew your name.

And it was in this overwhelming oppression that you noticed, first as a small spark in a well of dead logs, but then as a raging conflagration inside of your entire being, that this Hoth-prison of urban glaciation had made you free. You may have been on unemployment, you may have been an alcoholic, you may have been overweight and had ugly clothes and only a few friends that barely cared about you, but you realized with great humility that it too would pass, that the follies of human interactions webbing you into this dreadful circumstance -- the greed and the stupidity and the self-interest --were powerless themselves in the face of a winter storm's winds.

The winds are called Alberta Clippers, and they whip down from northern Canada across the Great Lake Ontario and onto the vulnerable shores of Upstate En Why with the fury of a space gale unleashed, roaring comets and cosmic dust made cold, their flagellations a welcome stigmata on we, the people in the down comforters.