Snow-Blanketing Day: this year's Boxing Day

 (Corner of 7th Ave and 17th St., 1:45pm 12/28)

I missed last wallopping winter in New York, and so was delighted to learn of Sunday's forecast:

Biiiiiiig Snow.
Since soon-to-be-snowy mornings are excellent for sleeping, my housemate's cat Jacques and I celebrated with my down comforter for a respectable stretch of morning.  But when I finally emerged onto Court Street at around 10, I remembered why these are such sleepy mornings.  I walked to my favorite local coffee spot and was lucky enough to nab a corner spot from which to watch the neighborhood's preparations.  I padded the following haikus into evernote on my iphone:





She began slowly
Blown gentle south down Court Street
Trader Joes is packed

Not everysunday;
Post-holiday and bracing
Groggy street awakes

Sidewalks get salted
Truckful waits at Atlantic
How much for a pound?

Strollers staying home
Cafe Pedlar's windowseat
Is mine for hours

Big plow pacing Court
Anticipates hero's call
Helpless New Yorkers

What began gently
Brings force of 18 inches
(is what they're saying)

Show us, white witness
What altitude really holds
We'll cover our heads

****

Anticipating Snowpocalypse 2010: The Final Saga, the YMCA around the corner closed early that afternoon, so I went for a merciless pelting ('run') south from downtown Brooklyn, instead of hitting the pool.  I looped south to the terminus of Columbia Street at an NYPD evidence vehicle yard in Erie Basin, then west/northwest along all the most deserted streets of Red Hook, back to Pier 6 and along the waterfront north through Brooklyn Bridge Park, up Old Fulton a block and then back up to the Brooklyn Promenade and home via Joralemon (pronounced with puckered lips: 'you're a lemon').  I wore rainpants and a water resistant running jacket, but the most essential pieces of attire were my wool baseball cap and glasses.  Face thoroughly blasted and stinging I made it home while there was still less than 9 inches on the ground and the wind hovered at a respectable but bearable 20-25mph.

Indoors, warm, dry, and fed but with no promise of escape predicted until the next night, by 8pm I was filling in my Facebook status bar:
"...out of shape for this snowbinding weather sentence."
Both housemates were away for the holiday week and though earlier relishing the solitude, I was soon saddened by a weather event weathered alone.
"Jacques," as I later wrote to a friend, "is bad at board games."

The 'mates and I had spent the smallest hours of Tuesday night the previous week up on our windy 4th floor tenement-top watching the lunar eclipse.  And in a memorable display of our sibling sensibility, Ryan and I spent the better part of the hour and a quarter patiently (and in multi-media) explaining to Nathalie just how a lunar eclipse works.  And then she pulled out some obscure brilliance about differently refracted light and the color spectrum when one of us mentioned the moon's earth-shadowed redness.  We froze our asses off and howled at the moon (my idea), and made up stories about the residents of the fancy condo towers that made it clearer than ever why our little building (smallest, oldest, shabbiest on the block) was such a slum.

I sent them both multiple musings from my side of the storm, and eventually went to bed, wind's howl threatening to slice right through the painstakingly-plasticked window holding our livingroom AC.

The NYT ran this hilarious piece that captures how this particularly whimsical snowpocalypse [almost San Franciscan in its block-by-block varied effects] humbled our unstoppable city.  And though everyone is pissed at Bloomberg, blaming him for slow-responding plows, people I saw today and yesterday seemed pretty tickled to be walking up the middle of usually car-jammed Court Street.  And the narrowly-shoveled sidewalks require the patience of a group hike, while I've seen strangers offering each other's arms across particularly boggy intersections.  On 17th Street in Manhattan this afternoon (wish I'd snapped a photo!!!), I watched two boys (or at least one boy and another set of boy-looking legs) building a top-access tunnel in a (no joke!) 5 foot-high snowbank.  The adventure is fun for the able-bodied among us.

Still, reports of people injured and unable to be reached by emergency vehicles are also stacking up, giving off the impression that some neighborhoods are more strategic than others.  Even City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, normally a Bloomberg ally, decried the City's slow response and is calling for a Council hearing to investigate dynamics behind slow excavation.  But even near 121st and Broadway yesterday afternoon, I'd come upon an elderly woman hesitating to step onto a slick-looking mound of sidewalk slush in her path.  I did like we always do, and gratefully lent her some support, talked her over the hurdle.  It's possible that many more like her haven't even made it out the house yet.  If my roommates were here to show me how to turn on the TV [again], I'd hope to see NY1 reminding its able-bodied, still home-bound watchers to check in on their less mobile neighbors. 

A weather event like this can quickly transform from an opportunity to be blessedly vulnerable and playful together in our altered streets.  It becomes a tragedy when response to basic needs in its midst are stymied.  And though we pay taxes for snowplows and snow removal (sort of), it is we, our beloved cities' neighbors, who are the most informed first responders.  Can we really expect city agencies to care better for our blocks and buildings--and most importantly their least visible residents--than we do?

One recommendation I'd make to the City Council at its blizzard hearing is for formation of an emergency first responding block captains corps.  Surely informal versions of this has existed at less 'automated' periods in NYC history?  Emergency Block [or Building, depending on block FAR] Captains (EBCs), could consult an electronic inventory of local volunteers, sorted by nature of disaster, and locate ones equipped with skis, brandy, first aid training, flexible work hours, etc., and assemble the appropriate crew for a given emergency.  These would fan out over a block surveying the state of each household's needs, and in turn contact secondary responders ready to cook, deliver babies, emergency medicine, etc...until City services were again functional.

What good is a Cityful of the world's brightest if we don't pool our brainpower when it matters most?

Fissures, breakdowns, disconnects are inevitable when the scale of provision is a city as striated as this one.  Though the ideal scenario is always universal, indiscriminate access, various structural obstacles prevent this even flow.  Still, New Yorkers can do a lot to fix our place in the small places we care about.

Stay tuned for: brownsnow rivers in streets: crossing guards to the rescue