Bad weather causes me to remember many of the events in my life.
In January of 1967, Chicago received a whopping 23 inches of snow. I was only 7 but I helped my brother, sister, and parents shovel not only our driveway, but halfway down the street after three days without the street being plowed. My dad needed cigarettes and he was tired of waiting. Since I was the smallest, I used the fireplace shovel, which was really the dog’s poop shovel. Once we shoveled two tire tracks down the street, our neighbors followed after us.
That same year was the Oak Lawn tornado which touched down about a mile from my house and killed 58 people. My second grade friend barely made it home before the storm struck. You can read about it in the anthology, Turning Points, or my blog.
In 1979, the Chicago area received another whopping snowfall, which determined the fate of the city’s mayor, who refused to plow the side streets. I was 19 and my sister and I attended a cross-country ski class. When I fell over, my pole sunk several feet into the snow.
My grandfather died during the first greenhouse summer of 1988 when temperatures soared in Chicago and the forests of Yellowstone burned. My parents found him dead in a sweltering house the day after Father’s Day.
I got married during the year of the floods, 1993, when the Mississippi River flooded most of the summer. I studied the hydrology of a small creek for my master’s thesis and started to really pay attention to weather and floods. Back then, we rarely got more than an inch of rain in a day and more than two inches was extremely unusual. Now Chicago often gets 3, 4, and even 6 inches of rain in a day.
Mitch and I used to go cross country skiing the week between Christmas and New Year’s up to the Upper Peninsula Michigan. We did this for many years from the mid-1980s through the early 2000s, but snow became more unreliable. We could often ski locally in southeastern Wisconsin later in the winter – now we are lucky to get more than one weekend a winter to ski in these areas.
In March of 2012, I remember being in a canoe doing data collection for a bathymetric map at my consulting job and we were wearing short-sleeved t-shirts (unheard of for Chicago!). The warmth lasted several weeks and threw nature off balance. That summer ended with sweltering heat and a severe drought.
Now, with February 2024 recorded as the warmest in Chicago’s history, I fear what the summer will bring.
Local sled hills are bare 99% of the time these days. I wonder if my grand nieces and nephews, who are all under five years of age, will ever know a time when there is enough snow to go sledding.
I miss the snow and skiing. Although this year with a fractured pelvis and having to use a walker, I was glad it was scarce.
