It is snowing here in Washington, DC. It is snowing a lot. There is something odd about the local response to the storm; there is a sense of panic. For those who come from the northern regions of this continent, the prospect of a snow storm brings many feelings but fear is rarely one of them. I’ve been wondering what this is all about, why there should be such different reactions. I don’t think it is simply the fact that people in the south are ill-prepared for these storms; although this is true, there is not much even those in the north can do to keep normal mobility during a true blizzard. But people here do rather irrational things that those from the north would never dream of doing. For instance, there is a typically a rush on grocery stores before storms even though most people have plenty of food to see them through. Why is this?
I think this all might have to do with the interference with mobility that a snow storm produces. We become trapped when the snow comes; we are isolated, in a certain sense, from the social (and actual) resources that we are so used to having at all times. But this has historically been a common situation among those living in snow-prone areas. One can either adapt (snow shoes and skis are not simply recreational devices - they are very important tools) or devote enough resources to make the period of isolation as short as possible without any adaptation. The later solution is the one chosen by most American snowy areas; neither has been chosen by DC and so we only have isolation. That is unless you get to know your neighbors. Perhaps that is the true lesson we can learn from frontier settlement patterns.