Due West: Column by Dan Whipple

Waiting for Godot in The Colorado Snow

By Dan Whipple, 12-21-06

At a daily newspaper, reporters dive under their desks when the editor comes around looking for somebody to do the weather story. Stories about the weather are boring. You’ve got to call up an “expert” and get her to tell you the same things you can see by looking out the window. A meteorologist must be roused from his customary torpor to describe the ninety-mile-and-hour wind howling through town, something the reporter can see himself from the patio by the parking lot.

The second problem with being assigned the weather story is the inherent implication that the reporter to catches the duty is too incompetent to do anything else. At the morning editorial meeting, the city editor says, “There’s a blizzard coming in. We’re gonna need somebody to cover the weather story.”

And the managing editor says, “Give it to Oscar. He couldn’t cover a dead dog with a blanket.”

The reason for this lackadaisical editorial approach is that it’s very hard to get a weather story wrong. And even if it is wrong, who would ever know? Are 20,000 or 25,000 people without power? Who went door-to-door counting them? Were there 23 or 27 cars in that chain reaction fender bender? Who cares?

The upside of being dragged out from under the desk to do the weather story is that it always, always, makes the front page. The photographer has a good picture, often more than one. And everybody, everybody talks about the weather.

And talking about the weather is what we’re doing here in Denver this morning, where we have two to three feet of snow choking the streets, cars abandoned in two bumper-to-bumper lanes from Flatiron Crossing Mall to I-25 in town. The general agreement leaning over snow shovels in the neighborhood is that this storm is much worse than the blizzard of ‘03.

I have a friend who takes the bus down US 36 from Boulder to his job at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver every day, a distance of 20 miles, give-or-take. Wednesday the bus came to a halt in traffic at about 10:34 and got home at 7:30 p.m., only getting off one bus to get on one going in the opposite direction.

“It took an hour to get form Flatirons Mall to the Broomfield park and ride,” Chas says, which is maybe half a mile. “Five hours out of Boulder, we’re a half mile short of Sheridan. “Of course, I had to go to the bathroom three hours into it.”

Chas didn’t have much to do during this adventure, “At first I’m thinking,’What are all these people doing on the road?’ It’s 11 o’clock in the morning. I’m looking out the window at cars going in the opposite direction, single driver, single driver. So eventually I started counting cars, to see how many had more than one person in them. For every hundred cars, nineteen had more than one person in them.”

Eventually, he says, “It was like waiting for Godot. We were waiting, but there was nowhere to go.” I-25 had been closed into Denver, so even if he had been to reach the end of US 36, he would have had to stop there. When Chas saw a westbound bus, he got out, walked over Sheridan Boulevard, taking the time to relieve himself behind a bush and smoke a cigarette. “You aren’t allowed to smoke on the bus,” Chas says. “I’m trying to cut down anyway.”

My nineteen-year-old son is working two jobs over his college Christmas break, one of which is shoveling snow. J. Crew was closed on Wednesday, so he was free to spend the day shoveling, which pays better anyway. On his way back home that night, the windshield wipers on his 1991 Subaru went out, so he had to drive the four miles home with head out the window, with visibility varying from the front of his hood to maybe a quarter mile.

I chanced to call him during this event. He said, “The fucking windshield wipers are out and I’m driving with my fucking head out the fucking window and these are the worst fucking conditions I’ve ever seen. I gotta get off the phone.” He rarely uses bad language in conversations with his father -- a statement probably true of most of us -- so this may reveal the depth of his anxiety.

He managed to get home without incident, where he plowed the car into the curb in two feet of snow trying to pull it into the -- complete snow-free -- driveway. It took five strong teens and one elderly cripple to finally push the car into its proper position.

My wife works at the Rocky Mountain News. She went to work at about seven a.m. because she feared begin unable to get there later in the day. She didn’t attempt to come home last night, staying at the Holiday Inn that’s within walking distance. She’d hoped to finish some Christmas shopping while she was stuck downtown, but nothing was open.

I shoveled three times yesterday during the storm, until there was nowhere left to throw the cleared snow. When I awoke this morning, a new foot or so had fallen, and two-foot drift had piled up in front of the garage. I got out the trusty Stanley tape measure and stuck it in some undisturbed snowfall. Twenty-four inches.

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