Traffic crawled along the Mohawk Trail, past the turnoff at Route 2A to downtown Shelburne Falls and up into Charlemont.
By traffic, I mean my daughter and me in my truck, the occupants of the car in front of us, and the plow truck leading our procession westward at the overly cautious pace of 34 miles per hour. A little snow was falling, with maybe a half-inch having accumulated on the road surface. Twice between the rotary in Greenfield and our destination, Berkshire East Ski Resort, the plow driver had hugged the right-hand shoulder, inviting the following vehicles to pass. Twice I'd rejected the offer, not because the conditions seemed particularly hazardous—they most certainly didn't—but because my daughter and I were enjoying this chance to mosey along our favorite highway at a tourist's pace, rubbernecking without risk.
When we arrived at the mountain, we were delighted to find what we'd hoped for: though this was Christmas vacation week—New Year's Eve day, to be specific—the parking lot wasn't jammed, there were no lift lines and, though plenty of alpine enthusiasts had made the trek to take advantage of the newly-fallen powder, plenty of others had opted to stay home, no doubt fearful of a likely white-knuckle drive from New York or Connecticut during what most media were calling "a major weather event."
The next day, New Year's Day, we encountered a similarly easy ride—this time at an average speed of 50 miles per hour, without a plow to lead the way—and a ski resort that wasn't as busy as it might have been on a bluebird day. Same thing on Saturday, the day some of New England—along the coast and up into New Hampshire and Maine—got quite a bit of snow.
In between trips to go skiing, my daughter and I ran around the Valley running a variety of errands, mostly in preparation for a big family party at our place on Saturday. Remarkably, everywhere we went—to the supermarket in Northampton, a mall in Hadley, a discount department store in Greenfield—we encountered little traffic and found parking lots and retail establishments nearly empty.
Of course, our party never happened. Scared by the media reports of a huge storm that threatened to envelop the whole east coast, my in-laws opted to stay home in southeastern Massachusetts, bunker down and try to survive Mother Nature's fury.
In fairness to my meteorological brothers and sisters, they didn't get it all wrong. The storm did hit some parts of New England fairly hard—though I'd note that the media so routinely overstates the severity of most weather "events" that our collective sense of what getting hit hard means has become entirely distorted—and we even got a few inches in Franklin County, where my family and I live. Still, but for the hysterical reporting on TV and radio throughout the region last week, I suspect most New Englanders would have been able to enjoy the long weekend without making any great accommodation for the weather.
It strikes me as both odd and unfortunate that the same media outlets that seemed loath to report on signs of trouble in the local and national economy in recent years—reporting not done, I believe, for fear of exacerbating recessionary forces that, as Chambers of Commerce are apt to argue, respond unfavorably to "bad" news—have been so quick to treat routine changes in the weather as some kind of crisis. While it is certainly true that New Englanders care about the weather, and that some kinds of weather really can be life-threatening, the weather beat on most local and cable news stations has become so prone to hyperbole as to be, at best, not very useful and, at worst, potentially damaging—at least, damaging to local economies.
Fortunately for my daughter and me, I long ago stopped paying much attention to weather reports—I still check the radar online to see what might be in store a day or two in the future—and started trusting my own eyes. The roads looked pretty good this past weekend, so out we went to have a good time and do our bit for the local economy. That my in-laws and apparently millions of other people opted to stay put was fine by us, but if this turns out to be a typical winter, we might start feeling a little lonely out there.
