City comes together to weather the storm

In the wake of a record-setting February for inches of snowfall in New York City, I thought it might be appropriate to dedicate 700 words to everybody’s favorite form of precipitation. My editor is always quick to remind me that this column is supposed to have some sort of Columbia relevance, and I was worried that the topic might not pass the test. But, after a conversation consisting of verbal abuse (I kid, she’s a lovely person), and a brisk reminder that the weather has everybody-relevance (duh), I came to the conclusion that I had the green light.

Allow me to start by saying that I have a newfound love for snow. After a year and a half of living in the city, I think I can firmly place nature’s window dressing on my list of “good” things (I recently came to similar conclusions about hockey and Owen Wilson, but I’ll leave those for other articles).

It’s worth noting that I’ve gone back and forth on the subject during my 20 years on this earth. I was born in the city, but moved to California when I was one, and spent the next nine years in the warm climates of the West Coast and Southeast. For those early years, “snow” was this weird phenomenon of nature, which I got to experience only on our holiday trips to see family back in New York. I loved the substance, but it was the shallow kind of love you feel for that family friend who visits once a year to bring you presents.

When I finally moved back to the northeast in third grade, my relationship with snow became more complex. On the one hand, snow often made it so that I didn’t have to go to school, which is just about the greatest thing an inanimate object can do for you. On the other hand, my soft, warm-weather upbringing left me less eager than my peers to spend those six free hours finding increasingly larger hills to fling ourselves down. I was that kid lobbying for the hot-chocolate/cartoons option.

As I spent more time up here, I came to appreciate the finer points of throwing snowballs at cars and playing tackle football in eight layers of fleece, but my formerly lukewarm affection for sledding became a lukewarm affection for winter sports. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been skiing or snowboarding. Add to that the fact that maturity brought with it snow-shoveling duties, and you’ll begin to understand why I was never one to list “winter” as my favorite season on those first-day-of-class personality questionnaires.

I mention all of this only to point out that I don’t love snow for the same reasons most snow-lovers do. No, I love snow because of what it does to New Yorkers.

To state the obvious, we live in a city where indifference is a way of life. That’s not to say New Yorkers lack compassion, but rather that a certain ability to ignore your fellow human beings is necessary in a place where so many people live in so limited a space. This is usually branded as a negative aspect of New York, but it’s also what has, for decades—perhaps centuries—made the city one of the most culturally tolerant places on earth. Still, there can be something undeniably cold and lonely about life here.

And this is where snow comes in. Political theorists have stated for ages that the best way to unite a people is to give them a common enemy. New Yorkers, in their struggle against the snow, are temporarily forced to let down the usual barriers of indifference. You see it in strangers who work together to chart the best way through the gutter-slosh between sidewalk and street. You hear it in conversations between business owners and customers seeking shelter in their establishments. You feel it in the shared warmth of the free hot chocolate provided by the Department of Parks and Recreation for those sledding in Riverside Park. You smell it in the…

You get my point. And, of course, it doesn’t hurt to have the kind of enemy that you can also use as a communal source for fun and/or public artistry. The Cold War might have ended up better if Gorbachev had let Reagan use the Kremlin as his own personal snowfort-for-a-day.

Okay, so that doesn’t make any sense, but I think my larger point does. There’s something vaguely unifying about the way the city slows down—just a little bit—after a big snow storm, about the shared misery of wet feet and stifling building heat. Don’t believe me? Just ask my editor. Snow has everybody-relevance.

Neil FitzPatrick is a Columbia College sophomore. Excuses and Half-truths runs alternate Tuesdays.