Once Upon A Snowstorm
This is far from a tale of high adventure, but it is A) about the one time a Washington snowstorm was more than just a day off for me and B) illustrative of the type of luck I have, e.g., I'm not lucky because my stocks grow exponentially, I'm lucky because mountains don't fall on me.
The January, 1987 event was one of those in which the federal government didn't decide to close until everybody had just schlepped in to work. Whether the law firm I worked at at 815 Connecticut Ave. mimicked Uncle Sam's staggered dismissals, I can't remember, but I was given the chance to vanish into the swirling snow provided I took a motion or something to the U.S. Dist. Court clerk in Alexandria and got proof of its submission.
In later years, as a reporter who covered Old Town on foot, I would know that the court on Washington St. is not an impossible walk from the King St. Station, but in '87, it seemed a Siberian distance. Only a cab would do.
No taxi in DC would even attempt to cross the George Mason Bridge* which had become the car-strangled spanner, so I metroed over to Rosslyn. All cabs there were hired and traveling sideways like crabs anyway. Next stop: National Airport, where I figured there had to be a cab. And I was right.
So began a four-hour crawl to and from the courthouse. On the way back, I noticed that the meter had ticked past $20.00. At that moment I was worth only $27.00 plus a card with fare back to Bethesda. The driver was a Turk or something and looked like he bit off goat's heads for jollies. To not let the bubble of suspense swell too great, we got to the airport just as the meter passed $26.00. My first bit of luck that day: I was able to pay my debts and didn't get my head bit off like a goat in Turkey.
The second bit of luck occurred on my Metro trip home. This was the first major storm to hit the Red Line's surface tracks between Medical Center and Shady Grove, opened only three years. Metro personnel operated in a bubble, learned as they went and nobody noticed that the snow was packing into the third rail shields and between the switching rails in yards, that is until loaded trains started stalling etc. I got off the very last train at Medical Center before the line shut down and commuters were stuck between stations for hours and hours.
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*So called carrying traffic to VA. The DC-bound lanes are the Rochambeau Bridge.
Copyright 2000, 2003 by Neal J. Conway. All rights reserved.