Last Tuesday morning at about 9:30 I was sitting at my
computer looking out towards the woods when lo and behold the flakes began. I
leapt up and before I knew it my five-year-old self had appeared. “It’s
snowing! It’s snowing!” She hadn’t shown up in a while so it was good to feel
that exuberant enthusiasm coursing through me.
As everyone knows, what got dubbed “Snowmaggedon” slowed
things down significantly in the Deep South, causing no end of trouble and some
tragedy. Nobody was ready for the freezing roads that developed in a matter of
hours, and when everyone tried to get home at once, the roads were clogged
immediately with frustrated and frightened drivers slip-slidin’ away. The
nation took notice. From television to radio to social media, everyone outside
the South had something to say about how poorly we were coping, and many living
here responded defensively.
I was reminded of literary critic and scholar Fred Hobson’s formulation
of southern self-consciousness in his 1983 book Tell About the South, subtitled The
Southern Rage to Explain. Says
Hobson, “The Southerner, more than other Americans, has felt he had something
to explain, to justify, to defend, or to affirm.”
The defenses of the South’s inability to cope with what for
most seemed like a thin buttery spread of snow on a generally toasty region
mostly went like this: “We know you think it is funny that we can’t drive, that
our schools close for days, that we post way too many pictures of snow on
Facebook, and that we make a big deal of just a little white stuff. But please
keep in mind that we have almost no practice in snow- or ice-driving and that
our towns and cities have very little in the way of snow removal equipment. We
are doing the best we can here, so stop laughing at us!”
Sociologist and writer John Shelton Reed observes in his
essay “The Three Souths,” in his book Minding
the South, “Southerners still do many things differently—and they keep
inventing new ways to do things differently.” I have no doubt that if the Deep
South were regularly to spend more time in the deep freeze, there’d be a lot of
adaptation going on. Cooks would come up with bourbon-flavored and
Karo-syrup-flavored and for that matter Tabasco-sauce-flavored snow ice cream.
Talladega would add an ice-driving event. Practitioners of noodling, the sport
of catching catfish by hand, would kick it up a notch by inventing frozen
noodling, or froodling. Every red-blooded southern male would lay in a supply
of sand to help with the neighborhood roads and invest in a 4 x 4 for rescues,
just as they head out with chain saws after tornadoes. And people would look
out for each other as they did during the last week, the old-fashioned way,
pushing stuck cars while still dressed in office clothes and thin shoes, and
the new way, setting up social media alerts for stranded drivers to find places
they could get warm and be fed.
I posted my fair share of snow pictures and took a little
ribbing for it. As the sun set on Thursday, most of it had melted, and the dock
looked like a postage stamp of white on the brown—but still frozen—lake. The South will ice again, I’m sure; I think
the next time we’ll be a little more ready.
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