Storm Teamwork

Timberline Lodge, home of elevators filled with blood and the only snow in Oregon.

Arguably the two rarest things in Oregon are snow and black people thanks to our proximity to the Pacific Ocean and our sterling history of institutional racism. Yet once a year, our local news stations get whipped up into a right proper frenzy about one of these two issues – I’m referring, of course, to snow. (To be fair, I’m sure Fox would have a “Black People Watch ‘08”, but the sad fact is that you can’t track black people with satellites the way you can track storm systems.)

Snow is a fairly common thing in a lot of the country – it’s basically rain, only rain that you can slide around on and throw at people that sometimes cancels school. Rain, on the other hand, is wet and dreary, uninteresting, and disliked by most save for a gaggle of poets and the first three people to reply to this update. Think of rain as the really boring kid in elementary school who hung around you all the time and only wanted to talk about lame, boring stuff – for some of you, that was probably me, but let’s forget that for a while. However, imagine if this kid had an awesome cousin who would come to visit every once in a great long while, and that this cousin had the power to cancel school, and gave everybody free skateboards, and shot candy out of his eyes. The day that that guy showed up is like the way it is when it snows in Oregon. While many of you Midwesterners may be tired of skateboards and free candy, we can’t get enough of them out here. It’s an exciting occurrence for everybody – for kids because they love skateboards and candy and for adults because they love to fret about the inherent danger of Snow and his toys.

The thing is, snow never really sneaks up on you in Oregon, because at the slightest hint of snow or snow related activity our weathermen awaken from their Xanax and Bacardi-induced slumber and say, “Wait! My job matters now!” Extra green screens are activated, interns bulldoze mountains of instant coffee into great vats of hot water, and researchers compile a full 20% more trivial information that is of no use to the viewer about the incoming storm. It is in these times that the antics of the wacky weathermen become significantly less wacky. Such is the nature of the world when the Storm Team is mobilized.

Every major station in Portland has a storm team, (sometimes they have epic battles downtown, flinging lightning bolts and cold fronts back and forth across the Pearl District, and… Well, no, they don’t, but we can all agree that this would do wonders for tourism) each one hand picked from the region’s bad boys of weather. Oft-run promos at this time of year feature each member of the given station’s storm team standing confidently in a crisp suit, superimposed over footage of snowbound streets as the authoritative announcer reads his or (rarely) her credentials. Amid all this action movie posturing, the weather person in question is nodding smugly, as if to say, “I’ve got your number, weather. Don’t you try anything on my watch.” After watching one of these commercials, I get sort of jazzed up about man versus nature. I think to myself, “Sure, everybody talks about the weather and nobody does anything about it – except for Matt Zaffino, chief meteorologist. Matt Zaffino makes weather his bitch.”

*You’ve got to respect how hard it is for the news station editors when it comes to finding footage of snowbound Oregon streets. Pretty much all they have is the candid footage of the car sliding down the hill and hitting all the parked cars, and the two people in mittens chaining up a car. After that, they have to default to shots of people skiing on Mt. Hood, or pictures of a computer running Oregon Trail when you get caught in a blizzard.

Right now, every storm team has agreed that everyone between Alaska and Mexico is straight up fucked this weekend. It seems like every time I turn on the TV there’s another frantic weatherman pointing at swirly computer rendered graphics, attempting to explain in no uncertain terms that God is going to personally rape all of us with snow, and that only by sticking close to the TV can we hope to be safe. This, in turn, has whipped everyone else into a frenzy, and now all anyone can talk about is the impending snowgasm. Rumors of up to three inches (which may not sound like much to some of you from more snow-prone parts of the country, but just apply the dog-years rule to every inch of Oregon snow and you’ll understand how much havoc it wreaks out here) have been fluttering around all week, and I’ve watched many people hastily redraw their plans for fear of getting caught in a Donner Party-esque situation.

The problem is, the snow isn’t coming. The first forecasts predicted snow on Thursday night, and here it is Saturday night with nary a flake to show for it. My friends in Salem have mentioned a dusting of sorts, but so far I feel slightly cheated by our storm teams. When snow didn’t come Thursday, they told us that we’d be screwed on Friday, when we weren’t screwed on Friday, they told us to wait for Saturday, and although I was waiting patiently to be screwed all day today, it didn’t happen. Of course, tomorrow is now the big day, but at this rate I imagine we’ll be hunkering down for a snowstorm in July.

But, as with any other kind of news, it behooves the storm teams to assume the worst and keep us scared. If we think there’s going to be a snowpocalypse, we’re far more likely to stay indoors, and so long as we’re indoors we may as well be watching TV, and if we’re watching TV we may as well be looking to see what the storm team has to say about it. And if, in fact, there is no coming snowpocalypse? Well, hey – the ratings come through the same whether it’s snowing or not.

So if you’re putting off driving to the supermarket because you don’t have a snowmobile, take heed: Rain’s awesome (yet dangerous) cousin may not be coming to visit us this year, and if you disobey Matt Zaffino and go outside, I’m predicting a 25% chance that he won’t try to kill you in his sleep.

Truman Capps doesn’t have anywhere to go anyway, so snow or lack thereof will have little effect on him save for amusement at the suffering of others. Merry Christmas!