Back in Northern Virginia, a real snow storm is on the way

When I was a junior in high school, Chicago was buried under 27 inches of snow. The city was paralyzed.

It took me a decade to get through college. But just after I began the last push that finally got me my B.A.- in 1979- we were hit with a 32 inch storm which Mayor Michael Bilandic's administration handled so badly that challenger Jane Byrne beat him in the Democratic mayoral primary, Chicago Machine or no Chicago Machine.

I was living in the Irving Park area of Chicago at the time, and driving to classes every day at Concordia- River Forest. But the snow storm put an end to that. I didn't so much as see my car again until spring- or any more of it than the aerial, anyway. Even the CTA was out of whack; service on the buses and 'El' was disrupted beyond the point where it could be relied upon.  I had to drop all my classes but one, and less walk than crawl and climb the whole, long way to RF in order to make Dr. Lowell Green's Reformation History class- and then make the same trip in the other direction.

Even a normal Chicago winter is an adventure. Lake effect snow aside, it is not for nothing that "The Hawk-" the fierce wind off the Lake- has its reputation for sometimes lethal brutality. Temperatures far below zero are anything but uncommon. And here in Iowa- where the prairies let the wind blow unobstructed for miles and miles even if there is no Lake Michigan- things aren't much better.

So decades later, when I lived in the Washington, D.C. area, I was amused to learn that they closed the schools when they had an inch of snow. Commuters on the Beltway slow to a crawl if the slightest bit of white shows on the shoulders; I used to think of them as "the Virginia Creepers." We had some snow, to be sure, and the weather in Northern Virginia isn't exactly tropical in December and January. But for somebody born and raised in Chicago and who had moved to the East Coast from Iowa, it was pleasant to experience such an unusually mild winter.

But the folks back in the D.C. area had a real snow storm earlier this winter. And they're about to be hit with one that would be an event even in Chicago or Des Moines: up to 30 inches of the white stuff. What would be a major problem even here, where such things happen from time to time, is close to unthinkable back there. Gov. McDonnell of Virginia has already declared a state of emergency.

I'm not being patronizing when I say that you guys back in Springfield and Alexandria and environs are in my thoughts and prayers. This kind of thing is no fun even when you're used to it.

HT: Drudge