Standing under the dim, flickering fluorescent light of Moser’s grocery, preparing for what was hailed as the largest weather disaster in recent Columbia history, I was seemingly frozen in time as the concerned masses of Columbia’s north side swarmed around me and picked at the sparse shelves like vultures. I suppose it would have been a better idea to go in with some kind of list or method, as every middle-aged housewife and balding old man seemed to have a contingency plan singed into their retinas, moving from milk to bread to eggs with speed belied by their age.
So this was it? This was how human beings handled themselves in the most extreme times of need? I failed to believe it. For all I knew, there would be no snow, no ice, no state-of-emergency weather conditions. I do hail from the frozen wastes of New Jersey, after all, and 10 to 15 inches of snow is a walk in the park back east.
Soon, however, the forecasts were upgraded and upgraded again. 12 inches to 18, 15 to 21. As suit-clad meteorologists pointed to green-screen maps, ramping up social unrest and mass panic, I began to realize the brutish reality of the situation. I would be stuck, helplessly trapped, with my seven housemates and a variety of hangers-on for an undetermined amount of time. Although all of these people are generally agreeable, I had no doubt that I would experience the absolute ugliest of human interaction over the course of the next few days.
As the predictions built to critical mass, and MU campus did the unthinkable, and cancelled classes for the first time in years, my housemates and I came to the unavoidable conclusion that the time was ripe for the greatest of all collegiate pursuits: throwing ping-pong balls at cups full of cheap domestics and remaining inebriated until the snowpocalypse was over.
For this reason, I am blessed with the good fortune of a poor memory, and much of the snowpocalypse disaster escapes recollection. Being a newsman, however, my pocket recorder was always at the ready, capturing the most mundane and the most severe moments of the revelation-esque spectacle that unfolded these past three days.
Dim memories of Luke’s downward spiral are among the most prominent in my mind, backed by a raw and chilling recording of its climax. After a brash, testosterone-fueled drinking competition with Sancho, Luke had reached a state of incoherence so severe that he’d wandered off into the impending blizzard, convinced he was staying at the wrong house. The tinny recorder captured our attempts to drag him back into the house before he succumbed to hypothermia, much to his drunken chagrin. Listening to it now, my voice rings loud and clear over the muffled packing sounds of meat slamming against meat, screaming “Sancho! Sancho! Did you hurt him?” Before an inch of snow lay on the ground, we had already dissolved into violence.
After Luke’s transgression, the apocalypse grew quiet. Muffled by blankets of snow, anger and mania gave way to introspection and paranoia, plunging the household into an uneasy silence. As our provisions dwindled, more of us retreated to the relative safety of our own bedrooms to weather the storm on our own accords.
Upon waking today, the third and final day of MU’s class cancellation, I am stricken by the grim hilarity of the situation. In three short days, I was witness to a full and depraved range of the far reaches of human behavior. Anger, envy, vengeance, greed, all precipitated by the hysteria induced by what amounts, in the grand scheme of things, to a relatively minor weather event.
