“The Unpredictable Earth”

by Jessica Kuzmier

     The weather around here has been a little out of sorts. Upstate New York is known for its snowy winters that begin in November. Instead of talking about the desire for a white Christmas, there usually is speculation of how many inches we'll get for Thanksgiving. The only reason why snowmobilers aren't out during most November days is that it conflicts with deer hunting season, and obviously there could be a bit of a conflict there.

     But the year of 2004 was different. As usual, there were no snowmobilers during November. But there weren't many in December either after the deer hunting season. There just wasn't the snow available for sledding. It got so bad, that not only was there no white Thanksgiving, but due to a rainstorm in late December, there was a threat that there wouldn't be any white Christmas either, this being in a mountainous area that is inundated with lake effect snow. Luckily, a snow shower spawned by the Great Lakes gave a dusting for Christmas morning.

     It's been easy to complain about the temperature around here. One day in December it was nearly fifty degrees and raining. Two days later, the high was forty-six, but by the end of that day, the temperature had plummeted to ten degrees below zero. Heating your abode is tricky when this kind of stuff happens. And New York has been the worst hit with this flu epidemic that supposedly we're not adequately prepared for, as far as the inoculation supply. This doesn't help dealing with the weather any.

     Christmas came, and along with the minimal amount of snow, bitter cold temperatures. Hitting zero in the winter is far from unheard of around these parts, but in early winter, it's a bit much even for here. You hear people in the stores and on the radio complaining about the weather. Sort of how I'm doing now. It was so cold, that I was glad that I was going to stay home, bundled and warm, away from the cold. That air felt nasty, especially with the wind. Nice to spend a day that was quiet and shielded from the elements.



     Hey, but Christmas was pretty nice. It was cold, and like I said before, at least we got a little dusting of snow to get the spirit right, Can't go sledding, kid style or adult style with that kind of thing, but what are you going to do. I heard that southern Texas had its first white Christmas ever on record. In upstate New York there wasn't a lot of snow, but there was a huge storm in the Ohio Valley that brought the interstates to a halt. I talked to this woman in a pizzeria the day before Christmas Eve who said that she was flying out to California for the holiday the next day. Which sounded great, until she mentioned that she was going to have to change flights in Cincinnati. Well, that sounded like it was going to be a hassle. Made you want to go somewhere nice and warm, like a tropical island.

     After a nice peaceful day, I decided to turn on the evening news, sort of a re-entry into the everyday world. Up until then, the day was filled with Christmas carols on the radio and eggnog and all kinds of non-Atkins Diet delights. The last big thing that had been on the news had been a couple days ago; in Mosul, Iraq a suicide bomber had walked into a mess hall full of American military personnel and contract workers. He blew himself up and took some two dozen people out with him. I wondered if the insurgents tried something else to ruin the holiday; Iraqi Christians had basically cancelled their holiday due to security concerns. Those elections were supposed to be coming up in a month, and a lot of garbage was being unearthed and flung around.

     There was news about holiday traffic, how the troops were celebrating the holiday, that sort of thing. Thrown into the mix was a report of a 9.0 earthquake blowing off in the middle of the Indian Ocean; I wasn't sure when it happened. It didn't seem to be much of a big deal to the news channel, since they immediately switched to talking about how local holiday travel was affected by traffic and weather. Apparently a lot of people had spent their Christmas stranded in the airport. That didn't sound so great to me. But I still thought it was weird that they weren't talking much about the earthquake. I suppose that because the epicenter was in the middle of the ocean that there were no fatalities or damage to anything. Maybe in the newsroom the earthquake was a freak of nature that was interesting to mention, like a white Christmas in southern Texas, and then time to move on to bigger and badder things, like how Scott Peterson spent his first Christmas as a condemned man, or whether the troops in Iraq had turkey or ham for dinner. I went to bed early, happily satiated from too much sugar and a cozy fire, spending good times with family.

     The next morning was so chilly that neither my spouse or I were thrilled to go get the morning paper from the end of the driveway, so we turned on the news channel instead to find out any overnight developments. Tsunami, was the headline. The 9.0 earthquake that had been apparently benign last evening had created an apocalyptic wave that smashed into several countries, including Sri Lanka, India and Thailand. The coastline was demolished, initial reports had the death toll as 12,000, but was expected to rise as more bodies piled on the shore. The sun had been shining, an eyewitness said. It had been a beautiful day for holiday, and for lying out on the beach. The sun was shining as the wave wreaked havoc and destroyed tens of thousands of lives. As the sunny day continued, the devastation would only increase, and tropical paradise after tropical paradise became a memory. There was no warning, the consensus said. The earthquake had happened two and a half hours earlier, hundreds of miles away; there was no warning that a tsunami was going to hit. Tsunamis just didn't happen in the Indian Ocean, so there wasn't a need for a warning system. At least, until that day.

     The temperature in upstate New York remained cold that day, as the news channel showed throngs of people standing along streets, begging the camera, begging me or whoever would hear, for help. They were holding signs bearing pictures of loved ones with the inscription "MISSING" emblazoned on them. It was an eerie deja vous, recalling the masses of people in downtown Manhattan three years earlier, doing the same thing. Except the numbers now were worse. The threat of terrorism was not there, but the same uncertainty and desperation still hung its veil. A Sri Lankan family wailed in desperation, clinging to each other amidst the debris. Eventually I pulled away from the television to get wood for the stove. It was cold in upstate New York, and my family needed to keep warm.