So long as I'm not driving in it, I love snow. So long as it's below freezing, there might as well be some snow on the ground. If a cold streak continues, the snow stays on the ground, and the grays and browns of winter turn white. There's always a few days of the gray and brown overtaking the white and leaving foot high mounds of what looks like gravel ice cream sundaes on the curb, but the time before that's pretty.
After a five year wait, New Jersey finally got its snow on. A huge nor'easter was closing down on the entire east coast, and would hit during a cold spell. For five days the news led with the impending storm. Doppler radar scans showed a red and green swirl the size of Australia coming toward us. People mobbed Home Depot to buy rock salt and shovels. Sanitation directors were saying "We'll be prepared" over and over between cigarette puffs.
Before the weathermen started quoting Revelations, I was thinking of the New Year's weekend as a busy one for Mixed Signals. Saturday the 30th we had a bar mitzvah, our first one. The 31st was New Year's Eve, and we had a gig in Metuchen. I also had $15 in gift certificates to Applebee's that was expiring the 31st. I was already booked solid this weekend, and didn't have room to fit in a meteorological hammering.
It was clocked to hit Saturday morning. Friday after work, Jeff and I drove into the city. We were meeting some Mixed Signals there, to check out some other improv show and, in a grand improv tradition, steal whatever games worked. There I heard our big snow casualty. Celebrate Metuchen had been canceled.
Celebrate Metuchen was not a First Night event technically, but an unrelated alcohol free community New Year's party. God, I'm tempted to call it a private label First Night, but I'll resist. I've been to them before, so I knew how well our shows would have been attended. Each town will have thirty things going on, but half of them will be at elementary school three miles away, and you were lucky to find a parking spot next to the sewage treatment plant. You'll have three things within walking distance: a trombone player who's already done for the night, a face painter with a two hour line, and a needlepoint instruction course. These people are DESPERATE for entertainment, and they'd happily see some comedy. And since it's improv, the people from the first show might have stuck around for the second one. But now we had no gig, and also no plans for New Year's.
Jeff and I drove back to Jersey City and bunkered down. White death was coming. Everyone else took a single car to Adrienne's house, where they also bunkered down. Only the insane would be leaving the house tomorrow. If only this was a weekday.
I woke up at 9:00. There's a giant window in my bedroom overlooking an alley I've looked out of maybe twice in my life. I made it three. There was a good thickness of snow on the ground, at least a few inches. Flakes the size of fingernails were adding to it.
The last time there was a massive snowstorm, I was living at home. I had to go out and shovel the driveway five times. This time, I didn't have to do squat. I still park in a driveway, but now the driveway ain't mine. The front walk? Ain't mine. Sidewalk? Ain't mine! I love renting. Assuming this bar mitzvah got canceled, I didn't even need to put on shoes the next three days.
Scratch that: I had no milk. Eleven boxes of cereal, but no milk. I also needed to hit the bank, since my minuscule cashback check from Discover had come in, and every week that thing wasn't deposited was a good cent of interest I was missing out of. I put on shoes, walked down my front stairs, and sunk past my ankles. This was the first time I had seen Jersey City with any amount of snow on it, thanks to the wimpy turnout last year.
The good thing about being in a city is it's possible to walk places. Thanks to one way streets, traffic and red lights, a lot of times it's quicker to walk. Bank, corner store, library, post office, DMV, all within a five minute walk. And when the roads look like bobsled trails, walking's the only way to go.
The corner store was open; the very nice man who speaks very little English lives above the store, I think. He was doing very good business. I picked up a dozen eggs as an impulse buy along with the milk. I never use eggs in my apartment, but I might have to go without the opportunity to buy eggs, so I picked them up. A week later, all twelve are still in the fridge.
The bank was closed. Something about the weather, the sign on the door said.
I was assuming the bar mitzvah would be canceled. All the Mixed Signals were huddling at Adrienne's house, since they all took one car out of the city. I called Adrienne, expecting to hear that it was pushed back a week, or a phone company apology that the 732 area code was officially snowed out. But she was there, along with the four other Mixed Signals who camped there the night. As far as she knew, the bar mitzvah was on. And at least seven people were promised.
If I was driving, I'd be taking Route 1 down the whole way. The news had traffic reports, but they were contradicting each other. One said the Garden State Parkway and New Jersey Turnpike were plowed, another said the Parkway and Turnpike were iced over and people were spinning out like dreidels. A third said that all roads were so bad that even the snowplows were getting into accidents.
I called Adrienne again. Our bar mitzvah contact wasn't at home. Presumably, she was at the bar mitzvah. Nuts. Well, time to earn my reputation as a car wrecker. Jeff and I hit the road.
Scott advised us to take a circle around the block. The worst driving would be the tiny local roads, so if the car could handle them, they'd handle the bigger roads. My car went at 5 mph and did a bit of fishtailing, but it went pretty much where I told it to. I made sure to go slow enough so, if I spun and hit something/one, my car would only suffer body damage.
A snowplow passed us, and we got pelted with rock salt tossed in its wake. It sounded like a machine gun emptying into the car. The snow made for bad traction, but none of it had turned icy yet. The best single patch of road was the drawbridge, since it's not a road at all but a metal grate with a river underneath.
Route 1 was full of SUVs. Ever since January 1996, SUV owners had been waiting for a big snow day to come, so they could finally use the four wheel drive for something other than show. I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't even going anywhere, just driving for the hell of it. My car, a '90 Mercury Topaz, has a clearance so low you can't get a playing card underneath it. I followed in the ruts of the SUVs; their front bumpers acted as good snowplows.
The visibility was only a block or two. On long stretches when I could normally see upcoming lights, I had to wait until I was practically underneath them. I was driving on memory first, sight second. But the roads were doable. By no stretch of the imagination pleasant, but I wasn't scribbling out a will.
We made it to Adrienne's house, without incident. The seven of us split up into two cars to take to the bar mitzvah, without incident. We rolled slowly down to Edison and the synagogue, without incident. We reached it safely and I turned into the driveway of the place, without incident. Then an incident happened.
With the roads white, the snowbank canyon on either side white, and all vision after thirty feet white, I don't feel I need a further explanation for why I hit the snowbank. I was rammed in there solidly, the hood in a foot or two deep at a 30% angle.
My dad put a snow shovel in the trunk of my car last year. I thought it was just a waste of space, since at the time it hadn't seen action in four years. And for a year, all it did was take up space. But now it was the lifesaver.
I didn't do the shoveling, of course. I wanted to, but someone had to be in the car to try reverse every minute or so. Here's where the guilt sets in. All the Mixed Signals digging me out with shovels, plus some guy I had never seen before, and me in heated comfort occasionally having to press my foot down. I'd need to find the confessional in the synagogue when I went in.
I'm not sure if snow shoveling counts as work on the Sabbath. If it helps, it was a mostly Gentile group that dug me out. I parked, ran inside, and joined the others. We made it. Now all we had to do was do a show that wouldn't offend anyone. Our normal audience is college students, who have spent their formative years with Adam Sandler movies and South Park. It's pretty much Sodom and Gomorrah on stage. This time around we've got senior citizens, conservative Jews, and four year olds. Oi.
As it turns out, we can do a G-rated show as well as an NC-17. The suggestions were mostly G, so it was relatively easy to stay that way. Surprisingly few 'snow' suggestions. Toward the end I got assigned to play a drug dealer, which I had to do with ibuprofen and rabies vaccinations. No lightning bolts struck us, so I'll take that as a good sign.
There was plenty of leftover food, so we all got stuffed before we left. I managed to keep kosher, but some other troupe members didn't see a problem with putting butter on their chicken. When in Rome, folks.
As I got in the car to return, I was warned not to drive in any more snowbanks. I said it ended up OK the first time, so I didn't learn my lesson, so no promises. Sure enough, not a minute later, I go to turn out of the synagogue and run into the exact same snowbank. I was fifteen feet away from my original dent. Another round of digging for other people.
We went back to Adrienne's house, played a frustrating game of Pictionary (damn you for playing it well, Adrienne), and then Jeff and I took off. Everyone else was smart enough to stay another night, but Jeff and I were persevering on Jeff's place. The drive at night was a lot better. The precipitation was pretty much done, so the window wipers could rest up. Plus the roads were empty.
Jeff just got an apartment in Hackensack, so I was crashing there for the night. He also just got a couch set for it, which I happily realized was just long enough for me to lie down on. He also got cable installed, so I was able to turn to C-Span and conk out faster than general anesthesia.
I woke up sweating. Jeff's on the fourth floor, and gets all the heat that rises up from the first three floors. They all cranked theirs up to deal with the snow, and so did Jeff, so in the morning we woke up in a kiln.
I had one goal that day: use my Applebee's gift certificate. Blizzard or not, I would be damned if I wasn't going to exploit my free lunch. Jeff found an Applebee's in nearly Paramus. We got in my car, which looked like a rock salt monster had taken a leak on it, and tried the roads. By this point they were pretty well plowed and salted. Paramus stores shut down on Sunday, so restaurants in malls are fairly empty.
I had never been to an Applebee's before, and so had Riblets. I don't know what part of the pig the riblet comes from, but each one had six small bones in it the size of dental film. You couldn't take a bite without running into two of them. Plus, the costs aren't too low. To use that $15 cost another $10 on the bill and another $5 for the tip.
It's embarrassingly hard to find the exit to a mall you've never been to before. This particular one was right by a major road, so my ultimate destination was ten feet away at times, but that ten feet was full of high curbs and piled snow and enough rock salt to kill a planet's worth of slugs.
I followed the edge that went parallel to the road, and after a quarter mile or so, found a passage that let me out. Unlike the rest of the plowed mall, this just had the homemade plow job of multiple cars pressing the snow flat. I followed this to where it joined the road, at a relatively recent snowbank. A few inches higher than the car's clearance, but there were plenty of tire tracks going through it and it looked slushy. Well, third time's the charm. I drove up to it, preparing to blast through and make highway speed, and the speedometer went right down to zero.
Out came the shovel again, with me at the customary spot watching others work. I was having a hard time remembering what shoveling felt like, so I squeezed out my door and did a few shovelfuls. It's not too memorable. A few minutes more of Jeff work, and I was able to back out, vowing to never even go over a speed bump ever again.
New Year's Eve proper was a nice surprise. There was a little party from old school newspaper people, old enough so Jeff and I were the young ones. Someone else from Mixed Signals was supposed to be there, but he e-mailed a few hours before saying he was going to Metuchen instead. Cut to a frantic half hour of me calling every Mixed Signal I could, trying to find the one cell phone number no one had. Eventually I found it (hidden on the phone list I was calling everyone from) and he had already gotten the word, so crisis averted. In a few weeks, that phone bill's going to come with a dozen six cent calls on it.
I'm hearing the storm be referred to as the Blizzard of '01, which is stupid. It happened December 30, 2000. How does that qualify as 2001? Yeah, the snow's still on the ground now, but my Christmas tree's still up and that's certainly not from Christmas 2001. There's definitely no other 2000 blizzard to confuse it with. Call it the Blizzard of 2000.
Or Snowjob 2000, if you had to work in it.