Last weekend the snowstorm I was wishing for finally came to the mid-Atlantic — exactly when I was supposed to be driving to Maine. I watched anxiously as the weather reports got worse and worse. Everybody knew it never snowed in Baltimore — my readers had assured me of that after my last disappointment over Baltimore “snow.” Just two weeks earlier, I got my hopes up over a hyped-up Baltimore weather report, only to be rewarded with a mere few inches of slush.
“It snowed maybe twice last year,” one person said. “And even then it was mostly just slush.”
“We never get more than 20 inches in a whole winter,” another Maryland resident said.
But when weather reports began predicting over a foot of snow in Baltimore, I started to wonder. At the last minute, I decided to take no chances: I wasn’t going to miss any of my short Christmas break home in Maine because of bad weather. On Friday afternoon, I hopped into my car and I started driving.
I had driven just outside the path of the storm, stopping in Connecticut for the night, when the flakes began to fall back in Baltimore. And fall. By the time I reached Maine on Saturday night, the city I left behind — as well as many of the ones I had driven through — was almost completely shut down.
“It’s really deep already,” my roommate said on a midmorning phone call the next day. “I can hear sirens all over the city. Everyone who has made it outside is walking down the middle of the street — there are no cars out. They’re carrying sleds.
“If you had stayed you wouldn’t have been able to leave until Monday, at the earliest.”
By the end of the big snowstorm, the same amount of snow had fallen in 36 hours that usually falls over the course of an entire winter in Baltimore. The city received 21.1 inches — the most for December since records started being kept in 1883. It was the seventh-heaviest snowfall of all time for Baltimore.
The irony of finally getting my hoped-for winter blizzard, only to have to leave before it started — combined with the irony of driving north to get out of the snow — was not lost on me. But the holidays are too short — my first at home in years — for me to miss any of them. Not even for a blizzard.
In Maine, we have plenty of snow on the ground, but the storm that roared up the I-95 corridor behind me stopped short of bombarding our state with more. Back in the mid-Atlantic cities — places far less prepared for such things — chaos was the order of the day.
“People are shoveling and doing what they can,” one Baltimorean wrote, “but the weather is bigger than people.”
For the most part, city dwellers were trapped in their houses and off the street — there was nowhere to push the snow to, even for the most ambitious armed with snow shovels. Of those who did venture outside, many trekked over to Patterson Park to try their luck at sledding. From what I hear, everything from boogey boards (apparently less successful) to cookie sheets (better), to actual sledding tubes (best of all) were employed.
Perhaps most bizarre, in my estimation, was the panic over the football field for the big Ravens game. Baltimore takes its football very seriously, and the prospect of a missed game was unacceptable. Ultimately, it was actual convicts working with stadium employees who cleared the field of snow — 125 inmates and supervisors from the Department of Corrections, to be exact, many of them, apparently, volunteers.
Here in Maine, I strapped on my snowshoes as soon as I could and tromped around the woods where the fields of snow were still deep. Wistful as I was that I dodged the big snowstorm, it certainly felt good to be back in my home state.
Ultimately, my disappointment was short-lived. It wasn’t long before Maine started getting some swirling flakes of its own — far from 21 inches, perhaps, but flakes falling nonetheless. Even a dusting filled my desire to watch real snowflakes in the air, snow that was neither freezing rain nor slush, nor the thin, barely there flakes of the South Pole. The thick, lazily spinning snowflakes that I had been waiting for fell slowly but steadily on our yard, and I watched them happily.
Record-breaking or not, I’d rather see snow falling on the pine trees and backyards of Maine any day than watch it completely shut down an inner city. I kept thinking back to what one Baltimorean had said, that “the weather is bigger than the people.” It all depends, I imagine, upon the people in question. To all of my fellow snow-lovers out there, if we do end up with snowfall of our own this holiday, enjoy it. And to those of you who hate the snow, cheer up: Your small New England towns can survive it far better than Baltimore did. This is Maine, after all. Merry Christmas.
Meg Adams, who grew up in Holden and graduated from John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor and Vassar College in New York, shares her experiences with readers each Friday. For more about her adventures, go to the BDN Web site: bangordailynews.com or e-mail her at meg@margaret-adams.com