I wonder why the NYT did not connect the current weather and all the storms so early for the winter and the conference in Copenhagen. BTW Europe has also been having a terrible early season of winter this year.
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Published: December 10, 2009
Yes, it is not winter yet. Which means yes, it is technically autumn.
But that's the beauty of December: It can go either way, and now we know
which way 2009 has been going.
An enormous portion of the country has been scraped and glazed and
numbed by several storms conspiring to act as one --- a kind of dry-ice
express bringing harsh temperatures, extreme windchills and lots of
snow. It has flash-frozen the Rocky Mountains, hit-and-run its way
through the Midwest and brought a characteristically complex mix of
precipitation to New England, where complex precipitation is regarded as
a sign of character.
It's rare for so much of the country to be so besieged at once by an
early winter. The southwestern plains --- parts of Texas and New Mexico
--- have been put out of commission temporarily. The Grapevine --- the
highway over the Tehachapi Mountains in Southern California --- has been
shut down, and there was ice on the roadways in North Carolina over the
weekend.
But the worst of this early winter has come in the places that are used
to the worst of it --- the Rocky Mountain and Midwestern states, where
windchills dropped into the minus-40s and true blizzard conditions of
high winds and heavy snow prevailed on Wednesday.
It's hard not to read an evolutionary imperative into a storm like this.
One as simple as: stay indoors if you can. Storms like these are an
occasion to go nowhere, to settle in and listen to the howling outside.
Dangerous as a hard, early winter can be --- none of us ready yet to
re-enact the hard winters of the past --- it is also the pretext for a
quiet contentment, when you give up any ambition of going out, when
nature sets its limits and you have no choice but to obey.
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A version of this article appeared in print on December 11, 2009, on
page A42 of the New York edition.
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