Friday, October 13, 2006

Stuck in the Snow Storm in Buffalo

So, I was in Buffalo yesterday meeting with one of the professors on my exam committee at his house, and yes, as you may have heard, the weather was pretty freakish. Actually, it started snowing about a half hour before I left the library for his house, and was pretty much a white-out by the time I was on the road. A white-out is exactly what it sounds like; you can see for about four car lengths in front of you and that's it. So, you drive very slowly to get places.

When I got to the professors' street, the branches had started coming down. The trees haven't lost their leaves yet, and so the branches became very heavy with the snow and started crashing down. All the way down the street, they were falling. You could hear:
CRACK!... CRACK!.... CRACK!... Every five seconds or so another one would come crashing down. From the news:
"I thought it was kind of pretty but eerie," said Ann Goff, who walked to her job at a Buffalo supermarket in the middle of the night. "It was scary listening to the cracking of the branches."

She's right. They were really loud and you had to drive very carefully to avoid them. When I got to the Iggers' house, I asked them if I could park in their driveway because it wasn't under any trees! By that point, they had lost power and the phone line was down. Actually, I saw a tree in their backyard take out one of the wires running to their house.

So, we sat around candles and talked about Karl Marx and Adam Smith. They're a lovely couple. After 50 years of marriage, she still jokes with him. "I have no television, and no radio," she said at one point, "so in desperation, I have to listen to you talk." They're nice people to wait out a storm with.

The drive out of Buffalo was about ten miles and took me two and a half hours. Once I got into Canada, the roads were dry. It's always a little better on the other side of the lake. But, I've never seen anything like this. It was coming down so fast in Buffalo that I would sit there in traffic, and within five minutes have a one-inch layer of snow covering the driver's side window! People might think: "But isn't Buffalo used to this sort of weather?" Well, yeah, but not on October 12th! This was a record-making storm apparently.

Also from My Way News:
"Our street looked like it was hit by a hurricane. It looks like the apocalypse. It's unreal," said Matthew Colken.

Indeed it was.

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