When I was a kid in Fairfax County, Virginia, just outside of DC, we used to joke about snow days. In February of 1978, we got something like 3 feet of snow, and it shut the schools down for a week. The county was clearly unprepared for this sort of thing, although at the time, we all figured that it was the start of the long-heralded Next Ice Age. From then on, school officials were so spooked they would cancel school or shorten the day on the flimsiest of pretexts, sometimes even on the prediction of snow.
That was then. In today's Wall Street Journal, Susan Cass writes:
What's the deal with snow days in the South? As a fairly new Virginian, moving here last year from Boston, I have been amazed at the locals' reaction to small amounts of snow.On Friday, our 8-year-old daughter Daniella came bounding into our room at 6:30 a.m., announcing that it was snowing and asking if school was canceled. A quick look out the window revealed about two inches of snow on the ground, with light flurries in the air, so I quickly dashed her hopes. Nice try, I said, but you're going to school. Silly me! When I checked the Web site, I was shocked. The county had closed all the schools for the day. I wondered if maybe they knew something I didn't about a looming blizzard, but as the sun rose on a glorious, cool day, and the snow started melting, I was left with the question: This is a snow day?
A few days earlier, the county had delayed school for two hours because it was too cold for the kids to stand at the bus stop. It was around 30 degrees. Above zero. In December.
Not that this was the reason, but what I didn't know at age 11 was the fear that some newly-minted bureaucrat, from, say, Warren, Ohio, to pick a place at random, who couldn't drive a snowmobile on a snowpack, would find himself taking a turn a little too fast and plow into the side of a bus. DC traffic is a perfect metaphor for the local monopoly. Local drivers - mostly immigrants, really - do just fine as long as conditions are benign. Then, even before the first flakes hit, their senses desert them. Drivers who've never seen a turn signal before in their lives panic at the first sight of yellow, and the city descends into chaos and gridlock. One local radio station used to run fake ads for stores called "Bread, Milk, and Toilet Paper," which were only open when snow was predicted.
