Not being able to open the front door was justification enough not to leave the house. Fairfield had gone tundra over night. My cat was terrified.
By noon we still hadn’t heard any plow and began to question if shoveling the driveway had been worth the effort. Still donning a monochromatic sweat suit and snowveralls, I ate instant noodles and premature cocktails commenced.
Extolling the end times. They just keep on coming.
As if we haven’t experienced enough extreme weather, Nemo swept over the eastern shore board blanketing Connecticut with more than three feet of snow; more than most of us natives can recall seeing in our lifetimes.
For the modern day human a blizzard is at worst a minor inhibition and at best an impromptu holiday. I was lucky enough not to be employed at Shoprite and forced to dig out a street to get my minimum wage job for time and a half pay at noon. I was mot lucky enough to avoid the annoyance of a brief power outage and the agony of realizing said-Shoprite was scourged of chicken flavored ramen noodles.
The real winners during these fleeting crises are, of course, the venerable Hummer owners, who finally get to prove the masculinity of their investment.
What did we do before moonrovers? For the early colonists of New England, a few feet of snow was catastrophic. Ghost towns litter the northeast. How fragile we were. Little wonder the puritans felt like trembling “Sinners” as Jonathan Edwards would write, “In the Hands of an Angry God”.
And maybe it was the mystical way the steam rose out of the hot tub and seemed to swirl and drift across the glacial expanse, a timeless leveling of our fast history, or maybe just one too many toddy’s, but it dawned on me that what for the pilgrims would have been an extinction event, for ancient man was a mere fact of life.
While most Homo sapiens fled south to habitable enclaves in Africa and Asia, our ancient rivals, the Neanderthals, conquered the icy terrain and survived in areas our ancestors could not. They lived in caves and formed complex societies. For them, there was simply no such thing as a snow day.
The last ice age ended a mere 10 thousand years ago and despite our technological superiority to the Neanderthals, a layer of expanded H20 molecules is still enough to stop our society from functioning for a few days.
Why is it routine natural processes incur such states of emergency? Think we’d be used to the planet by now.
No worries though. If the ice sheets ever do descend again we’ll just build bigger cars. So it would seem that all you really need to know to survive the snowpocolypse is how to craft the perfect hot beverage. Here are some recommendations:
The Perfect Hot Toddy
• Boil 1 cup of water and set aside one tea bag
• Coat the bottom of a coffee mug with honey.
• Combine 1 table spoon of lemon juice with 1.5 oz (1 shot) bourbon in the mug
• Once water is boiling, prepare tea separately then fill mug with tea
• Stir ingredients and enjoy immediately while HOT!
Hot Apple Cider
• In a large pot on high heat combine 3 parts apple juice and 1 part water
• Add one thin slice of ginger and, if desired, lemon wedges and several whole cloves.
• When saucepan is at a boil, turn down to a simmer and wait 15 minutes
• Strain out whole ingredients, add 1 cinnamon stick, and enjoy!
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