Column: Mo. weather is ludicrous
March 7, 2008
After three semesters of stubbornly insisting Columbia’s weather is no different than the rest of the country’s, I must concede. The weather gods hate Missouri and are probably angry that I’ve gone three long semesters without acknowledging them. So here goes.
When I first moved here from Illinois, I couldn’t understand why Missouri natives acted like insane weather patterns were something that didn’t happen in the rest of the U.S. Whether Columbia was set upon by a crazy lightning storm or an unexpected blizzard, whomever I talked to on campus chalked it up to “Missouri weather” with a blend of disgust and something that was almost akin to pride. Every time one of these exchanges with passersby occurred, the Illinoisan in my head countered, “Ummm ... no, the whole Midwest gets this kind of weather. Don’t act like your state is special.”
After almost two years, I’ve come to realize those silly Missourians were absolutely right.
The famous quote from “The Iliad” says Zeus has two jars in his halls — one containing mankind’s miseries and another its blessings — but I’m going to venture a guess that there’s a third jar lurking up there somewhere marked “Columbia” that contains a heaping pile of crappy weather conditions.
Mother Nature, the weather gods, fate or whatever you want to call it lulls many of us out-of-staters into complacency with a week or two of relatively normal hot or cold weather, and then it punches us in the head with unheard-of conditions such as near-50-degree temperature drops over an eight-hour period. In one particular episode, I walked out of my house at 8 a.m. happily anticipating a 70-degree day and was rewarded with a snow/hail/sleet mixture at 2 p.m. I have learned the hard way not to laugh at those seasoned veterans that wear three layers and carry a coat and umbrella everyday, no matter what the temperature.
I’ve also learned that unlike other regions of the country where weather is a topic only brought up when no one else has anything better to say, in Missouri it is a perfectly acceptable centerpiece of conversation. This is probably because of the fact that rare meteorological happenings seem to grace this part of the country a little more often than normal. For example, since I have moved across the Mississippi I have twice experienced thundersnow, a phenomenon so rare I thought the weatherman was making it up — that is, until I sat on my porch one night this winter with my baffled, sad neighbors, all of us bundled up in snow gear, as the sound of pouring freezing rain and snow was occasionally interspersed with thunder and lightning.
After enduring a winter full of the above-mentioned inexplicable occurrences — and more recently yet another week of summer Sundays and winter Mondays — I am hell-bent on appeasing the weather gods. I think a sacrifice would be a little too difficult to achieve, since I’m not allowed to start a bonfire at my apartment building and we need all of our weather forecasters alive to predict next week. Therefore, it’s the most I can do to let the angry climate deities know I recognize their existence and admit Missouri is in fact the state on which they shower desolation. Maybe they think Missourians are tough enough to take it. Now, can it please be freakin’ spring?
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