The Blizzard of '06

While remaining fascinated by weather, I can obviously be distressed by it as well. My small place in the world is so often at the apex of significant weather events. But I am much more at home in the face of unsettling hot/cold winds sweeping over the barren prairie than I am with ice and snow flung along on those same winds. Brrrr....

The Norman branch of the National Weather Service is renowned for housing the National Severe Storms Lab. When that reputable institution began making dire predictions on Monday about a pending winter storm, Oklahoma listened.

Still, out here in the badlands, particularly in regard to the weather, we heed the professionals and then make our own decisions. It was in that same vein that I cocked one ear toward a freak massive hailstorm Wednesday before noon. As I drove to OKC that morning, the temperature of 67 degrees dropped rapidly with each mile north as what we call a "blue norther" raked the plains. I was interviewing yet another hapless victim in the middle of the morning when a strident rattling overhead prompted us to abandon our discussion and peer out the wide office window to marvel at the sight of sheets of hail plunging into the ornamental pond outside and carpeting the still pliant grass. Thunder rumbled, lightning flashed and steam rose like smoke from the warm fall water as chunks of ice plonked, the temperature falling below freezing in the space of a half hour.

The sudden change in weather and the sight of a huge flock of geese flying quickly north stirred deeply-rooted instincts. No one else might be alarmed by the unusual winter hail, but I was heading for the house.

Steam continued to billow from standing water and Indian summer fields as I drove south. The sky was heavy and raindrops sheathed in mushy ice spattered against the window. Thirty dollars worth of cigarettes, bread and milk and I was at the grade school to give Ann instructions to walk directly home after school. Crowds of teachers and students huddled by windows, taking in the sight of "smoke" rising from the nearby river. That morning at 70 degrees, Ann had ridiculed my insistence that she drag along her heavy winter coat. By 2:00 pm, however, she followed my instructions to the letter.

Wednesday evening was an exercise in waiting and watching. The temperature continued to fall, hovering around 20 as the street lights shined sharply in the winter dark. Just as the prairie stills and tenses on the cusp of bad wind, the cold seemed to anticipate the coming storm.

And come it did, heralded in the plains way by more thunder, and lightning that seemed to gash the fabric of the sky, allowing ice to pour out. This was sleet, not hail, and within an hour, the badlands glistened under a sheen of thunder ice that would not subside until Thursday afternoon. All night the ice came, pelting north windows and coating power lines until the lights flickered and we were locked into winter.

The storm closed every school in most counties as well as state government and even the University of Oklahoma. Movement slowed and highway patrol officers joked on television that the world felt of Christmas. But that was not the end of it.

We here are veterans of the quick strike. Supercells build and tower, racing across the flat land, tornadoes flicker, dance, lash out and then move on. This was not the manner of what the media is now calling the Blizzard of '06. As the falling ice tapered on Thursday afternoon, the temperature around 17, the National Weather Service issued emergency snow warnings. A horseshoe shaped clearing in the radar-tracked storm streaming up from New Mexico and West Texas verified the warnings: there would be a cold lull and then the weather would build again.

No prairie storm occurs quietly. As dark snow clouds built to the southwest, the wind rose. When flakes of icy snow emerged from the sky, they were swept horizontal, riding a sometimes 50 mph gale from the north. I could not remember a time when the weather radar on every TV screen reflected a blizzard warning for over half of Oklahoma. But, incredulously, that is what happened on Thursday, a frozen echo of the dustbowl that dumped a foot of blinding snow just to the north and a full five inches here in the central south. Each home was a hopefully warm bastion against blizzard conditions that continued until almost bedtime. I may have seen more snow fall in the my life, but I don't recall having seen it fall so furiously, or for so long a time.

Friday morning dawned snow-choked and sharp. The temperature had not risen above ten degrees by ten am but the huge Oklahoma sky was scoured clean and bright, its intense blue a breathtaking contrast to the unbroken stretches of snow fallen atop black ice. Again the morning was reminiscent of Christmas. Only the indispensable stirred and long lines of trucks in Oklahoma City idled alongside roadsides waiting for troopers to allow access to closed major highways to Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas and Texas.

For now, the prairie is peacefully asleep, frozen in time under bright but cold sunshine that has not yet gained the strength to defeat the powdery layers of ice and snow. But it will. Our warmth will return and the ice will melt into grateful water. A flatlander prefers the land be nurtured by a soaking warm rain falling slowly in July to break the heat of a 100 degree day. Turns out nurturing happens in many ways that will no doubt leave us talking of the Blizzard of '06 for many years to come.