Wicked cold

STIPIMM: “Exquisite Dead Guy,” by They Might Be Giants

It got cold last week. And not in that sissy, shut down every school in Oklahoma kind of cold. It was Boston cold. Sub-freezing highs, bitterly sharp winds, bundled up to the point of immobility. In other words, a typical New England winter day.

And did I, the boy who hates winter, who dreaded moving north because of this weather, complain? No. I wrapped myself in layers of cloth and sucked it up like the rest of the city. When I had to stand at a T or bus stop for up to 15 minutes in that frigid environment, did I gripe? Pfft! You call this cold? Did I whine and moan when the shower didn’t have any hot water in the morning because all the radiators and the morning shower-takers in the building had used it all? Well, yes, a little, but then I moved on and starting taking showers at night.

Indeed, Bridget, the proud New Englander, did more complaining about the cold than I did, and the entirety of her complaining consisted of one utterance: “Brrr! It’s cold out there!” And when Bridget complains like that, bundled up in her scarf and big red coat, it’s just cute, so calling it a complaint doesn’t do it justice.

Boston cold is, yes, bad, and last week was, yes, miserable. Not a complaint, just the truth. But Friday was the icing on a week of bad weather. The winter storm that dumped feet of snow on the northern U.S. finally showed up in New England, and we got our fair share of the white stuff. This isn’t the first time that snow has fallen here this season; indeed, we got over an inch on Oct. 29, the record for the earliest snowfall ever in Boston. But Friday left all that behind; the day was just snow, snow, snow and more snow. It started in the early morning and by the time the city was waking up, it was causing problems with traffic, both car and foot. Even the T was affected (though that doesn’t take much); one stop on our line had to be abandoned because it was on an incline the trolley couldn’t stop there without slipping.

But of course, this is Boston, and if there’s one thing Boston (the city) handles well, it’s snow. In Washington, D.C., heads rolled in city government a couple of years back because officials in the snow removal department didn’t do their jobs well. When a city gets shut down by snow, the citizens are very vocal about their anger toward local officials. Getting to work on Friday, I got the feeling that any such citizen discontent got into the system and ironed out in Boston years ago; if Boston’s municipal crews did a poor job of clearing the snow, one could imagine an angry (but progressive) mob storming City Hall and lynching the head of the roads department. As a result, snow removal is a high priority, and it shows. By the time I headed to work, around 8 a.m., most of the major streets were already well plowed, and every smaller street had gotten at least one pass. When I got to Harvard Square, the snow was still coming down strong, but traffic wasn’t nearly as snarled as it would have been in D.C. in the same conditions; people were moving slower, but they were still moving steadily. Indeed, so together was Cambridge’s public works that they were plowing the sidewalks by the time I was there. Ask D.C. to plow a sidewalk and they’d just tell you to buy yourself a shovel.

Once inside the warm confines of my office, I was able to watch the continuing blizzard in comfort. And continue it did, well into the afternoon. And then, something happened to endanger the warm confines I was in: the power went out in my office around 2 p.m. It was Friday in a blizzard, so not many people had come into work in the first place (“working from home,” my ass), and most of those who had come in left after the outage prevented any work from happening. I, an hourly worker, had no choice but to stick around and wait until my eight hours were through (if I wanted to get paid for them). And so I sat and read, and talked to Bridget on the phone, and read some more. The power did come back on after a couple of hours, but by then, who really wants to work? So, I diddles around for another hour and left to meet Bridget to see “The Tempest” (which in D.C., given the same conditions, would have been cancelled).

By the time our wintry tempest was all said and done, it dumped 8.6 inches of snow on the city, which is a record for that date in Boston. It left the city cold, but beautiful, pretty much how I expected it would be.