Forty years seems like a long time ago. But how about 100 years? For a few days in February 1978, millions of Americans experienced, to varying degrees, the sensation of plummeting a century back in time as an onslaught of snow descended on their communities.
White-out conditions, furious winds and high tides combined to cut off power, choke highways, and close all but the most essential businesses or establishments determined enough to remain open.
Modern vehicles became useless, snow-bound contraptions and people hardy enough — in some tragic cases — foolhardy enough, walked to destinations. Candles and fireplaces provided light and heat and surging, storm-tossed seas turned homes into islands or simply ripped buildings off their foundations.
The instantaneous news updates and dire warnings that surround major storms in 2018 bear little resemblance to weather forecasting and public information resources available in 1978. Only people who literally live in a cave or some similar state of isolation are capable in 21st century America of claiming they are unaware of a major weather event like a blizzard or a hurricane.
But a relative scarcity of information allowed the Blizzard of ’78 to descend with a fury and rapidity that was at once terrifying and magical. Adults intent on getting to work or shouldering grown-up responsibilities found themselves transported back to childhood with enforced snow days for all but the most essential employees.
The snow’s dominating presence offered adults and children a limited menu of options for passing the time.
People shoveled, built snow forts, broke out the Monopoly boards and, if populations statistics are to be believed, contributed to an uptick in births over the next year.
Neighbors also pitched in to help neighbors, and people banded together on streets and in neighborhoods to ensure everyone had heat and enough to eat. That spirit hasn’t disappeared in 2018. In some ways, it has been strengthened thanks to technology’s ability to quickly connect people.
But the storm that forced to people to stop in their tracks and look up and around at the way weather was transforming their world also cooped them up in houses and the old Boston Garden long enough to strengthen acquaintances and initiate new ones.
Mobile device technology has an insatiable appetite for attention, meaning time people might spend watching a storm’s ferocity is now spent watching trending news for weather updates or Facebook chatter. Technology has even added the surreal opportunity for people to watch images of an event unfolding on a screen even as the event unfolds around them.
The conversations and banter that filled snowbound homes in 1978 are distractions in 2018 with the ability of mobile devices to tune out human beings in favor of a virtual world that fits into the palm of a hand.
Weather has the same ability to wow us, frighten us and alter our lives today as it did 40 years ago or 100 years ago. The information technology age has the ability to make us better informed about storms but it also has the power to distract from the experience of the moment that is the root of enduring memories.
