Chicken
Little
Forget
everything you’ve ever
heard about the rugged nature
of folks who live in the northeast.
You know what I’m talking
about – the image of
“yankees” as the
salt-of-the-earth descendents
of the puritans with a quiet
reticence and simple lifestyle
that has evolved from brutal
winter after brutal winter.
TV portrays us as so unfazed
by the elements that we’d
stand in a snowdrift all day
just to tell passers-by that
the can’t “get
theyah from heyah.”
It’s
lies – all of it. Well,
maybe not the accent part
if you’re from Maine,
New Hampshire, Vermont or
the eastern half of Massachusetts,
but certainly the rest of
it is untrue.
The
reality is that New Englanders
are a bunch of wimps. Despite
a lifetime of conditioning
to winter weather, at the
first sign of snow the so-called
“hearty” population
panics like Chicken Little
or, worse yet, like Southern
California drivers in a rain
storm.
To
wit: we went shopping the
day after the last major “Nor’easter”
snow storm to find the grocery
store absolutely decimated.
You couldn’t buy a loaf
of bread or a gallon of milk
even if you bribed someone
with a lucrative reconstruction
contract in Iraq. Apparently
the rugged New Englanders
are running so low on basic
foodstuff that they need to
raid the grocery stores at
the merest suggestion of a
snow day.
Either
that or they’re all
craving French Toast at the
exact same time which, if
true, must be some sort of
a world record or something.
Someone should call the folks
at Guinness.
Okay,
sure – Nor’easters
can be nasty storms that never
seem to end. But they always
do, as witnessed by the fact
that our trip to the store
was literally 7 hours after
the snow stopped falling,
and a mere 18 hours after
the storm started..
Exactly
what were people expecting
to happen? Are they planning
on being stuck inside for
a week? Even in the blizzard
of 1996 only shut down most
stores for a 24 hour period
and if you’re telling
me that yankees can’t
survive 24 hours at home without
panicking and emptying grocery
store shelves, well, then
that doesn’t exactly
sound like the definition
of “resourceful”,
does it?
Don’t
get me wrong – I hate
going out in the snow. But
it’s not because I’m
anxious – I just find
driving in the snow with it’s
requisite dodging slow drivers
and plow trucks to be utterly
annoying. That and I’ve
yet to own an SUV, an appliance
that I’m told makes
winter much more palatable.
But
then I don’t really
claim to be a yankee. Sure
I live here and will be living
here for many years, but that’s
out of obligation. I may have
been born in the northeast,
but I am, for all intents
and purposes, a southern Californian
in spirit. I hate winter,
I get depressed over the winter,
and I don’t refrain
from complaining loudly about
the winter.
But
you’ll never catch me
panicking over the winter
– I’ll leave that
to the truly “rugged”
New Englanders.
This
Essay © 2003 Lee Totten
|
