The climate people say the Winter Olympics may go away for lack of snow.
In Beijing, skiers complain about surfaces of man-made snow that diminish their performances. In the Alps, reflective tarps are used to preserve glaciers, huge tourist attractions that are melting away.
In Haines, a half-dozen or more skiers leave every winter for trips to Washington or Colorado, places with resorts or trails up at elevation, where snow is reliable and reliably skiable.
It’s a fickle equation. Six weeks ago Haines had more snow than anyone could handle or knew what to do with. Once upon a time, winter’s rainy thaws led us to say things like, “Can you imagine if all this was snow?”
Now we can imagine. It was one hell of a lot of snow. Six weeks straight of it. Drifts pressed up against windows and collapsed roofs. As the piles alongside driveways and paths grow to six or seven feet, shoveling became an Olympic lifting event.
A person wondered how long before city and state crews would trade in plows to buy the tractor-trailer-sized snowblowers the Canadians use to keep open Chilkat Pass. Plows lose their usefulness pushing snow against roadside mountains of snow they’ve already pushed there.
Snow once was a benevolent and bright part of winter in the Chilkat Valley, a welcome reprieve from the perpetual drizzly gray that can hang over this part of the world for days or weeks, sometimes months.
Snow is messier than rain and needs shoveling, but it provides for sledding and skiing and more importantly, a dramatic change of scenery at a time of year when a scenery change is worth something to a person’s mental health.
But the knife cuts both ways. Five or six feet of snow reduce our world to a series of narrow tunnels. The horizon gets cut off at unusual angles. Then comes the anxiety of a quick thaw, heavy rains on less snow one year ago loosened mountainsides, killed two people and put half the town in peril.
There is too much of a good thing, after all. There is too much dry in California. There is too much heat in Seattle. There are too many twisters in Kentucky in December. Such weather extremes are a feature of our changing climate and we should expect more of them, all the world’s weather scientists tell us.
Nature bats last. That little piece of wisdom, a nice twist on America’s pastime, was a bumper sticker a few years back. It wasn’t around long enough. Maybe not enough people these days follow baseball. Here’s the translation: The climate – something we barely understand and can’t change – will have final say over the destiny of our species.
Nature bats last should be tattooed on the backside of every baby born. God did not give man dominion over the Earth. Just the opposite.
Young people, teachers and idealists believe that the fate of our species lies in the race between ignorance and education. Older, wiser folks understand it’s a contest between humility and hubris, with hubris holding most of the chips and all the face cards.
Before we take climate change seriously, we’ll be skiing on plastic snow.
We are the hairless chimps who mistake gadgetry for progress, braggadocio for courage, and one-liners for wisdom. There is a great fire burning in our world and we are running toward it not to douse it but to capture it on video.
We need collective action to rescue ourselves, but we can’t muster it. We are moved by self-interest and spectacle. When fate comes for us, we’ll be taking selfies of it behind us, smiling while it closes in for the kill.