Buffalo Odyssey

I recently met a very nice couple, Evelyn and Ed, from Buffalo, New York. Our conversation centered around the recent weather events in their home city, specifically the sudden snowfall which occurred in late November.

They explained that it didn't begin to snow until the afternoon when everyone was already at work. But once the snow did begin it fell so quickly and so heavily that before anyone realized it the entire city of Buffalo was one big frozen traffic jam.

Evelyn explained that normally it takes her 25 minutes to drive between her office and her home, a length most commuters in Los Angeles would envy. But on this day it took her 13 hours.

She ate dinner out of a grocery store, and breakfast from the same venue because she had been grid locked in front of it all night long.

Her husband, Ed, gave up fighting the traffic after a few hours and left his car in a parking lot. When we talked he honestly had no idea if it was still there, if it had been buried by a snow plow, towed by the city, or occupied by polar bears. He spent the night in the Federal building in Buffalo, along with a congressman and several hundred strangers.

We've all heard similar winter horror stories from friends and relatives in the temperate zones of the United States. Growing up in Indiana I even have a couple of these stories myself. If you're a transplant from the any of the 45 states east of the Sierra Nevada, you probably have some, too.

My wife, however, does not. She is a native Angeleno, born and raised. She expects the sky to be steady and calm. In her experience it is the ground that storms.

I took her back home again to Indiana a few Decembers ago and mother nature provided her with some twenty degree temperatures, some snow and some ice for her drive upon. She was thrilled. But her winter lasted only five days before we flew home to a more domesticated breed of weather.

There have been times when I have described my wife as weather-impaired. I have scoffed at her thin blood, firm in my belief that the winters of my youth have made me a survivor.

But that was before I met Evelyn and Ed and heard their Buffalo odyssey.

Now, a snow story from Buffalo is like a story about a crooked politician; there is no suspense and no surprise. But Evelyn and Ed's epic travail made my winter of sixty-three, when a blizzard buried a snow fort while I was building it, seem mild. And my Hoosier February of sixty-nine, when it didn't get above zero for three weeks straight, was made balmy by the way they described the Buffalo snow fall of November two thousand.

As bad as the traffic snarl was, as fast as the snow fell, as wet and heavy as it was and as much as they worried about each other's safety, Evelyn and Ed kept repeating in wonderment, "It never snows like that in Buffalo. In November."

It occurred to me that if this freak snow event had happened in December, Buffalo-ians would have seen nothing unusual in the total collapse of the entire infrastructure of a modern major metropolis. So I asked if this was so.

"December?" Evelyn and Ed responded, "Oh, the city only shuts down two or three times in December. You learn to adjust. Now, February. It REALLY snows in February."

February in Buffalo sounds like August in Hell. And the word blizzard, I now know, is a relative term.

The meek, I am told, shall inherit the earth. I don't believe it. I think the true survivors will be found in Buffalo, New York.

And if they are smart, they will immediately move to L.A.

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Kimit Muston is a writer living in North Hollywood. If you have any comments about his columns,
he may be contacted at inditer.com

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