Snow Bound, Mysteriously

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Dec. 20, 2009


The good folks at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public life last week reported that 49 percent of Americans say they have had a mystical experience in their lives, a number up sharply from 1962, when only 22 percent of Americans said they'd had such an awakening. So I don't feel alone.

That is, I don't feel that I've been singled out for having a mystical experience, which the Pew folks don't fully define but which I will refer to as one of those times when you want to tap the nearest person on the shoulder and say, "You know what just happened to me?"

On Friday, I was cleaning some of the clutter from my cubicle at the Daily Local News (old press releases, assorted office supplies, envelopes whose return address reads, "Chester County Prison," "The Simpsons" Magic 8-Ball — answer "Well, duh," etc.) and came across a stack of old and faded news clippings of stories with my byline. On top was a story I had written in February 1983 carrying the headline, "Storm among county's biggest."

You remember Feb. 11, 1983, don't you? That was the Friday when 22 inches of snow fell on Chester County. It was my first snow fall as a staff reporter for the Daily Local, and one I have never forgotten. And now I sit at my desk looking out the office window at double-digit snow accumulation and wanting to tap someone on the shoulder and say, "You know what just happened to me?"

The snow started falling in the late afternoon that day 26 years ago, and my friend Jamie called and said he was staying over at the apartment I had moved in to only weeks before because he didn't think he would make the drive up Route 100 to his parent's home in West Vincent. I said he'd be welcome to sleep on the soda, my repayment for having slept on the floor of his Pottstown apartment for several months when I moved to Pennsylvania in 1980. We had a wonderful time that evening running around in the snow and drinking schnapps at the Rat on South High Street, although I do not believe that either of us would remember it as a mystical experience. Then the telephone rang on Saturday morning and my editor told me that she had made it to the office and thus I had no excuse for not showing up for work.

My assignment that Saturday was to go back through past issues of the paper and find other blizzards that left the county under deep blankets of snow. And from my research came the story that sits on my desk now, making me want to tap someone on the shoulder and say, "You know what just happened to me?"

I am struck today at the revolutionary changes that have occurred since I wrote that story. To research past snowstorms today you type the phrase "snow storms past Chester County" into Google and you get 32,700 references in 0.29 seconds. To research past snow storms in 1983, I had to wrestle open the grey filing cabinet drawer in the clip library, and wade thought the "Weather" files that had been loving created by the late Jeanette "Bring That Back When You're Finished!" Davis, staff librarian, who insisted on putting clips about worldwide earthquakes in the "Weather" files. The exercise took me the better part of the morning before deadline.

But it also introduced me to Chester County in a way I had not yet experienced, mystically or otherwise. I got to read about the history of the county from an everyday perspective. Not tales of George Washington or Mad Anthony Wayne or William Penn or Buffalo Bill Cody, but of the woman in southern Chester County who found herself stranded in the snow and needed for help. "Please! Milk for two babies" she wrote in the snow in front of her home. Helicopters dropped off a load and she was able to keep the family going.

That was in 1958, when 32 inches of snow fell in March, only weeks after an earlier storm had left 17 inches on the ground. I wrote in my story about how Chester County Hospital was without power during the storm, and that only one doctor had been able to make it to work. About how the wet snow made a porch roof in Coatesville collapse and kill a man who had been standing underneath it. About how the Pennsylvania Turnpike was closed from Harrisburg to the New Jersey border, and how Downingtown Burgess Creston I. Shoemaker declared a state of emergency and pressed otherwise unoccupied citizens into service directing traffic in the borough.

I wrote about how Kennett Square was "thrown 50 years into the past. There was no light, no heat, no telephone service, no water outside the borough and impassable roads. I wrote how 30,000 homes from Coatesville to West Grove were without power, and how the roof at the Esco Cabinet Co. a "milk cooling-unit manufacturer on Chestnut Street in West Chester" caved in.

All that writing helped me learn about the place I had moved to, and begin the journey to today, when I actually know where West Grove is.

Consider yourself tapped, shoulder wise.