“You need any help?”
That was always the first question asked when we entered the next bar that night while walking the snow-covered streets on Wheeling Island on Saturday night. Among the plethora of taverns, there were the I.D.E., Harbor Lights, the Voo Doo, and, of course, Mac’s Holiday down on Virginia Street, and every patron was exhausted but happy to be finished for the moment with the last blast of a wicked winter.
The forecast for the mid-March weekend was for heavy snow, and local weatherman John Domenick delivered his warnings day and night and Joe DeNardo “said it would,” and it sure did.
It was more snow than anyone expected, and it hit hard about week before spring was scheduled to bloom. It began on a Friday evening with a gentle snow, but by Saturday morning the flakes were fat and tall and heavy on everything they covered, and the cars and trucks and swing sets were burdened and buried.
Life changed the moment we couldn’t decipher backyards from still-and-silent roadways, and it took shifts of shoveling and one mug after another of hot chocolate to keep the sidewalks clear. Traffic crawled on the interstates, snowballs were heavy, kids ice skated on the streets, the salt and cinder trucks wore chains, and heading back to school wasn’t a possibility for a couple of weeks anyway.
Just like back in January 1978.
Those of us who were born in the mid-to-late 1960’s experienced – as children – the “Blizzard of ’78” on January 26-27, and Mother Nature dumped more than two feet of snow that Thursday and Friday. Schools were closed, drive-thrus became walk-ups, and most businesses were operated by skeleton crews for weeks following the record-setting snowfall.
But the ’93 storm set new standards, and the National Weather Service dubbed the devastating cyclonic storm – or “nor’easter” – the “Storm of the Century” after more than 28 inches blanketed Wheeling Island (where we lived at the time) and the residents along the hilltop ridges counted to much higher figures.
The National Weather Service is now forecasting that this weekend’s expected storm will begin Saturday evening, continue overnight, and then continue on Sunday.
How much snow will fall, however, is again the great unknown.
