The Blizzard of ’88 in New York City

As the North digs out from last night’s blizzard, maybe it’s a good time to share an excerpt from It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes about the mega-storm of 1888 and the rather obscure origins of our word “blizzard”:

One of the worst winter storms in United States history came to be known as the Blizzard of ’88 after it struck the eastern U.S. on Monday, March 12, 1888 and lasted through Wednesday, March 14, affecting one-quarter of the nation’s population of the time, and isolating hundreds of cities from Maryland to Maine. The storm halted New York and over a dozen other major cities in their tracks, cutting off virtually all transportation and communication.Winds reached 48 miles per hour in New York City, and snowfall averaged 40 to 50 inches over southern New England and southeastern New York State, with drifts 30 to 40 feet high.

Snowdrifts in Middletown, New York covered three-story houses; townspeople tunneled through, shoring up the tunnels with timbers.  At sea, where mariners called the storm the “Great White Hurricane,” winds up to 90 miles per hour and waves up to three stories high were reported.  At least 198 ships were lost, sunk or grounded, with the loss of about 100 seamen.  On land, the death rate from freezing or storm-related accidents and illnesses approached 300, with 200 dead in New York City alone.  For years people gathered on the anniversary of the blizzard to recall the storm.  Others would never be able to forget it, even if they wanted to:  Dozens of babies born during the storm and shortly after it were named “Blizzard,” “Storm,” “Tempest,”  “Snowdrift,” “Snowflake,” and “Snowdrop.”

The origin of the word “blizzard” is a bit hazy. Some etymologies link it to “blizz,” which was in use in New England as early as 1770 to refer to violent rainstorms.  Other sources suggest a connection with “blaze.” Still others say it was used to denote a “hail of gunfire.” After the Blizzard of ’88 hammered the east coast of the United States then hopped the Atlantic and struck England, the London Times reported the word had long been in used in the English Midlands, where “May I be blizzered” meant to be “bowled over, or knocked off [one’s] feet.”  The New York Times responded indignantly that the word was of American origin and was simply “a bit of onomatopoeia.  Like the hoof-beats in Virgil’s poetry…the word is supposed to sound more or less like the thing it denotes.” This notion is supported in our day by The Oxford English Dictionary, which reports the word is probably “more or less onomatopoeic.”

When the big storm of 1888 finally reached Germany it was already widely referred to as the “American Blizzard.” German newspapers reported the word originated from the German “blitz.” The contemporary American author Gary Lockhart corroborated the German claim (in his book The Weather Companion) with what he claims is the first printed mention of “blizzard,” in a newspaper in Esterville, Iowa, in 1870:  “Many of the early settlers in this area were from Germany, and when witnessing the severe winter storms, would use the German expression ‘Der Sturm kommt blitzartig,’ meaning ‘the storm comes lightning-like.’  The transition from blitzartig to blizzard was a natural language progression.”

I was born on Columbus Day, 1954 and as a child was more than willing to accept the conventional hero stories of that era. Later, when my friends and I were old enough to  read objectively and think for ourselves, many of us became appalled, as are countless others, by the real story of Columbus: the  destruction of native people and their cultures, the cruelty, greed, arrogance.  The writings of European men who came to the New World primarily to plunder it are notoriously unreliable, but now and then you can find a passage that shimmers almost against the writer’s will with astonishment at the natural abundance of North America. To anyone with the capacity to appreciate it, the experience must have been mind-blowing. Although most of the pages of Christopher Columbus’s journals are dry and practical and self-serving, when he wrote about seeing Cuba for the first time, he burst into  poetry.  But notice how quickly the language turns cold as he converts his marvels into commodities:

“…And flocks of parrots that obscure the sun; and there are birds of so many kinds and sizes, and so different from ours, that it is a marvel. And also there are trees of a thousand kinds and all with their own kinds of fruits and all smell so that it is a marvel. I am the most sorrowful man in the world, not being acquainted with them. I am quite certain that all are things of value, and I am bringing samples of them and likewise of the plants.”  

When I was a kid I liked fall best, October especially, month of my birth, of crisp nights and colored leaves, of Halloween and apple cider and firewood to be split and stacked before winter. Summer was trivial, made for children and tourists, but autumn was somber, solemn, mature. It made me impatient to grow up. On windy October and November days when I was twelve years old I would stand on the shore of Long Lake and watch the year get swept away and be overwhelmed with a delicious sorrow. The season clarified me. It was sepulchral. It was elegiac. I savored its bittersweet tang.

Donald Hall writes that Michigan’s fall is like Europe’s – “burnished old gold; yellow harvest mellow with violins; Autumn of the falling fruit and the long journey toward oblivion; muted and melancholy…” – though surely he was thinking of Ann Arbor, where he once lived and taught, and not the wooded and hilly rural north, where autumn’s colors boom in operatic excess. Up here is as different from Ann Arbor as Eagle Pond is from Cambridge. But Hall is right about the melancholy, the falling fruit, and the journey toward oblivion. We have all three in abundance. Every dropped leaf, every skidding rain, every flock of geese passing overhead reminds us of winter’s approach. Were the days a movie, the soundtrack would be mostly cellos. We grow suddenly impatient and hurry outside to gather all the music and fragrance we can hold, stocking up on sensations for the sterile months ahead. If we must stay indoors we put on a kettle of water for tea, settle into a chair beside the fireplace, and open the first of the season’s thick novels. Either way, we’re digging in against oblivion…

[from "The Several Autumns," by Jerry Dennis. Originally published in Dunes Review and reprinted in Orion, and to be included in my forthcoming collection, The World at Hand: Essays in Four Seasons.]

On the “make lemonade” premise I considered writing a diet book, one that was sure to hurl to the top of bestseller lists. It would be titled:  Lose 10 Pounds in 8 Hours! The Contaminated Food Diet!

Instead I’m content to live the rest of my life with an abnormal fear of turkey-and-hummus  roll-ups left sitting for ten hours on the seat of my car, frequently in sunlight, while I negotiate the usual insane traffic mayhem across southern Ontario until I’m so exhausted and famished that I eat those lukewarm packets of infection despite the voice in my head warning me that it might be a bad idea.

My sources tell me there might not be a name for such a phobia.

But late that night, in my room at Queen’s University in Kingston, after the fourth or fifth time I scuttled to the bathroom shuddering with fever and put my head in the toilet, I thought, “Hey! I’ll compile a list of other interesting phobias!”

Turns out it’s a long list. Here’s an abbreviated version:

Fear of blushing (erythrophobia)

of books (bibliophobia)

of children (pedophobia)

of deep water (bathophobia)

of fresh air (aerophobia)

of dust (koniophobia)

of flowers (anthophobia)

of food (cibophobia) [GETTING CLOSE]

of frogs or toads (batrachophobia)

of God’s wrath (theophobia) [GETTING CLOSER]

of hair (chaetophobia)

of light or the sun (photophobia)

of motion or wandering (dromophobia)

of novelty (neophobia)

of perfection (teleophobia)

of imperfection (atelophobia)

of poison (toxicophobia) [BINGO!]

of sleep (hypnophobia)

of sounds or speaking (phonophobia)

of standing still (stasophobia)

of strong or rapid breathing (pantophobia)

of the number 13 (triskaidekaphobia)

of words (logophobia)

of work (ergophobia)

of everything (panphobia)

(Pieter Bruegel the Elder, “Sloth”)

three R’s (reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic)

three points in a good landing

Three Signs of Being in Buddhism (impermanence, suffering, absence of soul)

four seasons

four classical elements (Earth, Water, Air, Fire)

four states of matter (solid, liquid, gas, plasma)

four humors of Hippocrates (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, blood)

four temperaments of Hippocrates (sanguine, choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic)

four points on a compass

four freedoms (of speech, of worship, from want and fear – Franklin Roosevelt, 1941)

five ages of Man

five senses

five Great Lakes (North American)

Five Nations (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca)

six types of quarks (up, down, top, bottom, strange, charm)

six types of leptons (electron, electron neutrino, muon, muon neutrino, tau, tau neutrino)

Seven Seas (varies locally and is often idiomatic; list most often accepted today is North Atlantic, South Atlantic, North Pacific, South Pacific, Arctic, Southern, Indian)

seven continents

Seven Hills of Rome

Seven Wonders of the World

Seven Deadly Sins (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride)

eight bits in a byte

eight days (and nights) in Hanukkah

eight legs on a spider

eight tentacles on an octopus

eight vertices in a cube

eight paths to the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths

eight planets in our solar system (now that Pluto is a Dwarf)

nine muses in Greek mythology

nine circles of hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy

twelve pence in a shilling

29.531 days in the lunar month

365.25 days in the solar year

100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy

100 billion galaxies in the universe

100 billion neurons in the human brain

“My Heart is Like a Zoo”
– children’s book by Michael Hall

“My Heart is Like a River”
– song by Rebecca Lavelle

“My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea…”
– from the poem, “A Birthday,” by Christina Rossetti

“My Heart is Like a Singing Bird”
– the Christina Rossetti poem performed as a song by Lorna Kelly and  Niel Chapman in a live concert in Harare, Zimbabwe

“My heart is like wax, melting within me.”
– Psalm 22:14, King James Bible

“My heart is like a wheel.”
– from “Let Me Roll It” by Paul McCartney & Wings

“My heart is like the autumn moon”
– poem by Han-shan (from The View from Cold Mountain)

“… my heart is like a speeded train”
– from “Out of Place” by Oliver James

“My heart is like an open highway”
– from “It’s My Life” by Bon Jovi

“My heart is like a mason’s hands of weathered skin,
each scar makes it harder for me to hurt again”
– from “Pretty Girl from Chile” by the Avett Brothers

“My heart is like burnin’ up, burning up,
my heart is like burnin’ up, burning up,
my heart is like burnin’ up, burning up,
my heart is like burnin’ up”
– from “Burnin’ Up” by Faith Evans

“My heart is like a jigsaw puzzle”
– from “Jigsaw” by Lady Sovereign

“…my heart is like…a little pool/Left by the tide”
– from Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems

“My Heart is an Idiot”
– book of essays by Davy Rothbart

“My heart is like a bomb. She knows I’m full of shit, but she thinks I’m cute.”
– from “Fuck Yeah American Idiot,” the tumblelog for Green Day’s Broadway musical,  “American  Idiot”

“As for the wellsprings of wonderment, they run deep. The quiet mind, the youthful heart, the perceptive eye, the racing blood – these conflow to produce wonder.”
– E.B. White, The Points of My Compass

“Solitude. Where does its value lie? For in solitude we are in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, trees in blossom), things of less value (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the greater possibility of attention.”
– Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“I love the poetic gait, by leaps and gambols.
– Montaigne

“I paint transience.”
– Montaigne

“Chaos, in a work of art, should shimmer through the veil of order.”
– Novalis

“One man, I remember, used to take off his hat and set fire to his hair every now and then, but I do not remember what it proved, if it proved anything at all, except that he was a very interesting man.”
– Dylan Thomas, “Reminiscences of Childhood,” Quite Early One Morning

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
– Goethe

…and, of course, the other topic dear to the heart of poets:

bang
bone
belly-bump
booly-dog
boozle
buff the floor
do bouncy-bounce
do a bit of hard for a bit of soft
make carnal acquaintance
cavault
do the conjugal act
consummate
coot
perform the culbatizing exercise
do the four-legged frolic
frick
frigg
do ficky-fick
do horizontal refreshment
practice in actus coitu
do the Irish whist
jig-a-jig
lay
lay pipe
ling-grapple
make the two-backed beast
make nooky
nub
nurtle
poke
roll in the hay
romp in the hay
toss in the hay
rut
do smockage
screw
shag
shake the sheets
roll the soul
trombone
make amorous congress
do what Eve did with Adam