DELTA LOWS
This was not the world that had put us to bed. This was not a world we’d seen anywhere, not in the moon shots nor the Scholastic News, not in the downtown department-store-window wonderlands nor the collected works of Rankin/Bass. This was snow, yes, and January snow along the Great Lakes was as obvious as the nipple in Farrah Fawcett’s swimsuit. But not like this.
We’d gone to bed, my brother, Ralph, and I, in our shared attic bedroom, with the temperature mild, above freezing, and no expectation of a storm. And now we’d awoken to the sound of a winter hurricane, a sound that reached down our throats and gripped hard on our hearts, the other hand grabbing us by the nutsacks, a sound running its outlaw flag up our spines, and we peered out the frosted windows at our known universe, and we could not recognize a thing. The snow had not just fallen deep—twelve new inches on top of the sixteen inches already on the ground—but was being driven asunder by a terrifying anarchic wind, whipped into peaks where flatness should be, scooping out its own road in defiance of the taxpayers’ pavement, piling a sharp, white dune against the neighbor’s parked car, shaping shrubs into rain barrels and rag mops and hippopotami.
We leaned obliquely over the radiator, side by side, looking out the twin set of windows, their panes frosted with the difference between the escaped steam and the irrational weather outside.
We gazed into the predawn at something terrifying and beautiful, neither of which adjective applied well to the city we knew. Akron was many things, most of them good (though fewer by the year), but drama was not its forte. It was steady and safe, a place where every twentieth-century generation until our own could bank on a lifetime job with one of the rubber companies. What we saw was everything we knew suddenly turned completely foreign, and it did not feel good. We didn’t then know the meteorology of what was happening—that the temperature had just dropped from thirty-four to thirteen between 5:00 and 6:00 a.m.—twenty-one degrees in less than an hour—that the barometer had plummeted to 28.28 inches, the lowest reading ever recorded in the United States outside the tropics; that the winds were gusting over one hundred miles an hour, that the windchill was sixty below. We did not know we were in a winter hurricane. We did not know a trucker had become buried in a giant snowdrift on the highway and would survive the next six days eating snow, a long tube stuck out the window for air. We did not know of roofs torn off and windows imploded, of trees toppled and a helicopter bouncing across the airport grounds like a paper crane. We just knew what we heard: a high, freakish howling like nothing we’d ever before heard. And it was that—not the wind itself, but the sound of the wind—that drove through the thin gaps of the inefficient, old sashes and touched us like a bad fiction of the undead.
In the predawn, we saw plummeting flakes big as Communion hosts. The snow in the air and on the ground turned in drunken, violent swirls. Everything familiar was obliterated.
I loved to read stories about scenes like this, about homesteaders on the prairie tunneling their way from the kitchen to the barn, snow piled to the second-story windows, and the harrowing dialogue of escape that unfolded over harsh, hot coffee back safe at the kitchen stove. Joe. They called their coffee joe. About soldiers on the Western Front tracking red trails across cold, nihilistic snowscapes that would darken the rest of their lives. About cowboys stranded on the high plains melting snow to keep them alive, capable men of the land who knew that eating it cold would spell their end.
One other thing we did not yet know: that sophisticated people consider talking about the weather code for boring conversation. We didn’t know this because in Ohio most days, the weather is the most dynamic and remarkable aspect of our existence. Daily, it lays waste to our plans, it depresses us, it makes us laugh and marvel. It has its own language and legend. We speak of the lake effect and the snowbelt and Delta lows and Alberta clippers, of a lascivious summer humidity and a winter cold that cracks us like eggs. We pass down legends of the 1913 Flood, the ’88 Drought, and, more than anything else, this: the Blizzard of ’78, for which the phrase storm of the century is statistical fact.
Weather, in places like this, is culture.
I fumbled for my glasses in the dark, finding them on top of my dad’s old footlocker at the end of my bed, a big metal trunk whose army-drab top I’d covered in Wacky Packages stickers. We went downstairs.
An empty juice glass with a bit of grapefruit pulp in its bottom indicated my father was already up and gone. Gone, despite the day. He’d left a note. He’d set off on foot with a shovel for his office a mile away. My dad was a partner in a small civil-engineering firm, the kind of place that in Akron in those years relied almost completely on work from the tire companies, as did virtually all of the city. That source was crumbling at every corner, and my dad must have felt that he couldn’t take a day off, even a day like this, for fear of losing more. So he was off shoveling snow that was being blown haphazard by fifty-mile-an-hour gusts, which is like trying to line up cocaine-injected lab rats single file for inspection. But that is the nature of this place—and it is the nature of my father, and, I think, of all the men of this place—to do, for the sake of doing. We are restless to begin with, and we are of a place that does not look kindly on rest. So my father shovels snow that will not stop moving and says he is doing it because it needs to be shoveled.
Thus we will do the same. Ralph and I will pull on every layer we can manage, tube socks covered by baseball stockings covered by our father’s old woolen army socks covered by plastic baggies covered by green, steel-shank rubber boots. Long johns and sweatshirts and flannel and tragic polyester ski jackets. And then we will take up shovels from the garage.
Every family in the American Midwest has a collection of shovels accumulated across generations and ranked by hierarchy. The term good shovel has the same meaning and relevance in this region as good shoes has in the Bible Belt. Ralph, being the alpha male, would lay claim to our grandfather’s wooden-handled, wide-bladed plow shovel—the “good shovel”; I would be relegated to a contemporary plastic thing with a flat blade—the “chump shovel.” And so we would begin.
* * *
I am descended from engineers. Tinkerers and builders and puzzlers; men who sometimes invented problems just to solve them. My grandfather, for instance, built his own table saw. It takes an Escher-like hybrid of pragmatism and imagination to build a table saw when you have no table saw with which to build it. You wonder where a mind gets to thinking that way.
I knew that my grandfather had served in World War I, but that’s about all I knew of the subject. I knew there were awards and medals, but not how they had been earned. I knew the clothing I’d secretly tried on in his attic—a woolen overcoat; a leather belt—while a half dozen uncles drank beer and howled downstairs, a laughter of sheer force. But I knew nothing of where or how or why these things had been worn. I didn’t know the things I really wanted to know: whether he had fired a real gun, if he had jumped into a dark foxhole only to find himself face-to-face with an enemy soldier; if he had gone through the pockets of a dead man to find the picture of his wife and child. Which is to say that I could only understand my grandfather’s service by imagining him through the prism of All Quiet on the Western Front, which I had found on my parents’ bookshelves and read one summer in the limbs of the backyard apple tree. Which is to say I knew nothing of life, not even the lives directly surrounding me.
Only many years later, long after his death, did I learn he had been part of a little-known mission that no one, not even those who took part, ever quite understood. I found, among the boxes that represent the luggage of my lifetime, a booklet of poems written by a man named R. S. Clark and titled The Creation of Russia. I’m not sure how it got in with the rest of my books, but it was tucked between volumes I’d kept as mementos of my grandpa: an indigo hardback titled Geologic Survey of Ohio and a brown one called Roofs and Bridges: Stresses. Inside the cover of the slim poetry collection was a handwritten note, dated 1958, from one of the men he’d served (and no doubt suffered) with. One would expect this sort of note of such men who came from a place and time when hardship was held inside until it passed, like a gallstone, ruggedly and without remark, men from the Corps of Engineers:
Apparently Rodgers had these printed some time in the past. They are sent with the compliments of his son Dick.
* * *
On September 4, 1918, just as the war was nearing its end, fifty-five hundred befuddled American soldiers found themselves crunching their mittened hands under their armpits for warmth and stamping their feet against the frozen ground of Archangel, a little town in northern Russia. The air was frigid and a cold sun lay low on the horizon. The goddamned army had issued them boots with slick, treadless soles, footwear better suited to a fight-or-flight-can’t-get-any-traction nightmare than battle maneuvers in the snow and ice. Most of the soldiers, including my grandfather, were from Michigan, men in their twenties who’d received penny postcards instructing them to report to Fort Custer in Battle Creek. In the fruitless poetry of operations, they were called the American North Russian Expeditionary Forces. Around carefully shielded campfires, they renamed themselves the Polar Bears.
My grandfather, an army engineer, lived in a boxcar where he and his fellow infantrymen puzzled over how to face an enemy that wasn’t exactly an enemy in a battle that wasn’t part of a war. Even if that question had an answer, it wouldn’t have done any good. Illogic was the only certainty to their time in the far north. On Armistice Day, November 11, as the rest of the human race recognized the end of the Great War, the Polar Bears—the 339th US Infantry—were in a battle with thousands of raging Bolsheviks, a fight that was as gruesome as it was ambiguous. The war was over, yet the close combat went on for four days, with twenty-eight Polar Bears killed and seventy wounded, and more than five hundred Russian casualties.
So isolated were the soldiers that they could only guess at why they were fighting or what might be happening back home, so far away. They were caught in the middle of another nation’s revolution, dispatched to fight the idea of something, which always makes for a difficult motivation, especially where homicide is concerned. They didn’t know that a letter-writing campaign was under way, calling for the nation’s leaders to bring them home. They didn’t know that President Woodrow Wilson was harboring private regret for his decision to send them there, admitting later, “I have at no time felt confident in my own judgment about it.” They were sick and freezing, ill equipped, wondering if they’d been chosen only because they were natives of the snowy upper Midwest, and whether anyone had any idea that it was never this cold back home. They pulled boots off dead Bolsheviks and put them on their own feet, throwing away the useless ones issued by their own military.
The Creation of Russia is mostly about two things: cold and the question why. It opens with a poem called “Memorial Day Prayer,” filled with a particular kind of hurt, first for “thy children who have died,” but more for the injustice of being sent to kill and die without a mission, its final line pleading, “Oh, make our duty plain.”
By midwinter, the issue of whether they should be transported home was irrelevant. The Russian ports were frozen and there was no way out. So the fighting went on, the Americans firing unreliable, Russian-made Mosin-Nagant rifles and Lewis machine guns into relentless waves of Russian soldiers, whose attacks continued through the winter and into the spring.
One soldier wrote of their plight in a letter home: “We had to fight to save our necks and that’s what we did. We didn’t know why we were fighting the Bolsheviks. We fought to stay alive.”
I found my grandfather’s brown overcoat in his attic, a heavy garment so long it draped behind me like a sad monarch’s cape. It never occurred to me then what he might have felt as he lived inside this coat, inside a boxcar inside a land that not even a Great Lakes winter could have prepared him for, and the Great Lakes winter is not to be trifled with. I took, or was given, I don’t remember which, a leather belt with a strap that went up and over the shoulder. For some reason, boys are always drawn to things that strap over the shoulder—guitars, rifles, backpacks—and by these things they are allowed to test the weight of whom they might someday become—musicians, soldiers, wanderers.
My grandfather never talked about it, or not to me anyway. He was an engineer first, a man of utility and order and who gave no truck to sadness or complaint. He was also a man of cold, frozen places, of the Great Lakes, which in winter offer something more pure even than the deepest meditation: infinite, white, terrible ice. These lakes aren’t flat when they freeze. Their edges are frozen images of turmoil, waves and swells and garbage-flecked foam, clenched, caught unawares by the hard freeze. To gaze upon this is to set the mind first to flatness then to practicality then invention. Men from the Great Lakes region do not seek therapy, and not because doing so would bring them discomfort or shame, but because it is unnecessary. The winters here isolate everything but our troubles and allow the time and emptiness to solve them or find a place to hide them forever.
So my grandfather lived his life. When he needed a table saw to build his workshop, he worked out the puzzle in his head: build the saw first. He wrote a little booklet of his own—Home Workshop Handbook—and copied it and offered it “to anyone foolish enough to send name and address and one dollar to cover cost of prints.” The pages are filled with uncanny practicality, handwritten in the precise block script common to engineers and draftsmen, detailing the properties of glues and adhesives; recommended drilling speeds for various materials; maximum spans for joists and rafters; lumber grades, nail sizes, wire gauges, and so on and so on.
The work is painstaking and tedious and raises the question why, which he answers in a brief, matter-of-fact introduction: “If this data had been readily available years ago, it might have prevented several poorly glued joints, burned drills, broken screws, and sloppy shellac jobs.”
After my grandmother died and he had to start cooking for himself, he took a shine to prefab, frozen supermarket dinners. But they were too big for one serving, so he took them to the basement, fired up that homemade saw, and sliced the frozen slabs in half.
* * *
By the time my dad returned home, grinning and caked in white, we’d flung layer after layer of snow onto the continuous mound that wrapped the edge of the driveway, growing and growing. He came right into step with us and we continued to try to scrape away what the night had left behind. The wind had calmed some and the snowfall abated, but not enough to settle the nerves. Nothing was moving, anywhere. Not a single car had passed our house all day, and the sounds of digging and scraping were distant, disconnected. The idea that all of this could have happened so unexpectedly, so quickly, so violently, and so completely disturbed us all, even my dad, I think, though he seemed invigorated by the challenge to set it right. Men like him are at their best when something needs unexpectedly to be fixed.
We worked until the driveway was clear, ready for whatever might come next, then Ralph and I, and our sister and our younger brother, began to dig again. We hollowed out a cave in a Volkswagen-size snow mound, scooping and shaping deeper and deeper, until we four could sit upright inside. Then we carved out another, then began a tunnel between them and then another, until we had a network like the tubes in a gerbil cage. The light inside was strange, an optical paradox: muted and radiant, opaque and incandescent, and the sound had a similar quality, compressed and private and complete. Even the temperature was ambiguous. The packed snow warmed like insulation, until the cold crept into the bones and refused to leave.
Later, when night had fallen, I went back out and crawled inside and lay there in the dark, in the snow cave. It smelled like mute earth. I felt as if I could stay there forever, in the peaceful silence that only cold can produce. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to be carried off.
* * *
We took turns on the sleds, sometimes riding double, sometimes the four of us piled one on top of the other in defiance of physical laws, teetering, elbows digging into backs, gathering just enough momentum for the cartoon spill. We rode on a golf course near our home, down a glorious hillside hooded with oaks and maples, deep into a valley with steep sides and one slope gentle enough to climb back up for another plunge. We rode this way into the afternoon, into the late shade of a complicated winter sky. The northern Ohio sky is perpetually overcast in wintertime, but the acclimated natives could pass a blind-test between the early dusk and the sunless midafternoon, just as a Las Vegas lounge lizard inside a casino can sense the difference between 3:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. This was different, though. The sky had darkened in a way we’d never before seen, as if its humors were out of balance, blackening it with blood or bile.
Three days in, and the blizzard had only worsened. We were lucky; we had power and heat. Even so, we were isolated. Schools were closed, with no clue to when they might reopen. Most people couldn’t go anywhere. Many were stranded wherever they had been when the storm hit. Those who did go out often had to turn back. It was hard to understand anymore whether this was an adventure.
Nature will always provide the best metaphors, and here amid the chaos, with the barometer lower than it had ever before been, was a strange coherence. Two weeks before this historic storm, Goodyear announced it was closing its main Akron factory. Nearly fourteen hundred people would be put out of work. A month later, Firestone would announce it was closing its big Akron plant, eliminating twelve hundred jobs. That year, 1978, four thousand people would lose their jobs in a city defined more than anything else by its work.
But as children, we didn’t understand all that any more than we understood the barometer. What we understood was the velocity of steel and plastic on ass-groomed ice, caterwauling down the hills, cutting hard into turns and skidding, sideways stops, imagining ourselves at Innsbruck: Dorothy Hamill; Franz Klammer; Rosi Mittermaier. We’d brought along a pair of skis and tried those too, but the sleds were the thing, the flat-bottomed ones shooting us down the hills.
Our fingers and toes were deadened and impliable, such that the walk home was filled with complaining and the calculation of how bad these digits would burn when we filled the tub with hot water for the thaw. We played a game of frostbite one-upmanship, insisting nerve damage or blackened skin or amputation was imminent. As we pulled our sleds across the white fairways and greens, the sky began to take on an eerie darkness and suddenly more snow came, not floating, but crashing down, handfuls thrown by the lesser angels and saints, the simmering ones, disgruntled seraphim of the back-office operation whose task it was to remind us that ours is, every so often, a petulant God. And that’s when I heard, for the first time in my experience of Ohio snowstorms, thunder.
We stumbled toward home in ragged formation, trudging faster through the snow. If you have never experienced an electrical blizzard, it is flat-out unnerving. The difference between thunder in a rainstorm and thunder in a snowstorm is the difference between Jimi Hendrix and Black Sabbath. It is bowling balls hurled toward hell.
We all started to run, pretending not to panic, until we made it home.
* * *
Days. Days. Somewhere out there the trucker melted more snow, drawing oxygen through that tube. A meteorologist was stuck at the airport, unable to get home—the weatherman himself stranded by the weather. He was taping extra pages onto his chart, the valley of the barometer so low it went to the bottom of the paper scroll and beyond. Somewhere, people were dying and had died.
Faith and belief are not the same thing, and anyone who has lain inside a snow cave at night in the dark of the American Midwest knows this. Faith is the promise of what might be. It is the blood brother of hope. Belief is pragmatism in isolation; it is what exists even if the world doesn’t know you’re there and never will. That’s something more like the place I knew.
* * *
Our igloos lasted till Easter, the packed crust holding its form and the burrows inside abandoned. Eventually, their roofs collapsed or melted through. Rain got to them. Mud and black twigs pushed up from underneath. We kicked at them, resentful of the lost thrill. And then that day came, the day no one around here ever really believes will arrive, a day drunk, stumbling home from late winter, glasses cracked, salt-stained boots kicking the cans of hard times down the storm sewer. Sun and warmth, riding like a white-hatted parasite on the spiny back of a cold breeze, euthanizing the briny, primordial ice clenched to the curb until it bleeds its last.
For one day in Ohio, we get something whispering low in our ear, something hard to appreciate unless you’ve been through the Delta lows and Alberta clippers. The sun comes with an offer, one we are never sure we deserve. We have waited, we have waited, we have waited, and finally it comes and we have no choice but to accept this, our fate: the discomfort of grace.