It's Going to Snow Soon

  • Posted on: 11 October 2005
  • By: Jay Oyster

[First posted on the Daily Kos website on October 11, 2005 -- I have to say, looking back over this from 8 years in the future, I wasn't too far wrong in this. GM went bankrupt, and we had the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression since I wrote this.  I hope that those events were *all* the bad things in the future that my aunt was foreshadowing.]

"It's going to snow soon."

I had a nice visit this past Saturday with my favorite Aunt. My Mom's sister is named Ann, but I always knew her as Keresthmama, which is 'Godmother' in Slovak. It was always nice to have a chat with her. What was odd about this conversation, however, was that Keresthmama died three years ago.

Now, I'm not one to believe in ghosts or to even have much faith in an afterlife. But this conversation hit me hard. Yeah, I was asleep on Saturday morning when the conversation occurred. I knew I was dreaming, and I know a bit about how the mind works. But I was curious, so I asked her why she had come. We sat in the kitchen of my mother's farmhouse in Ohio, and she looked at least 10 years younger than the 84 she was when she died. In the dream she was still old, but hale and smiling. She spoke as she had in life, with good syntax and a clarity she worked hard at, since she wanted to make herself understood through the strong Eastern European accent she had retained from her youth back in Czechoslovakia.

"It's going to snow soon," she said, by way of explanation. This was odd, because I have to say that the sunlight streaming through the windows of the kitchen was golden and warming in a gentle, heartening sort of way, and even more strangely, I could see that it was raining outside, also in a way that insistently whispered of a refreshing Springtime of growing things and greening hillsides.

"Is it really?" I asked. She nodded and smiled some more.  We talked for maybe ten minutes in that glorious room. We spoke of ordinary every day pleasures and inconsequential events, but eventually she looked over at me again and said with a kind of simple, but pleasant, seriousness on her face, "It's going to snow soon."

"How do you know?" I asked.

"It's coming." she said and nodded, as if in confirmation of a disputed fact. Then she said one last thing before I woke up, "We ate avocado and apple butter last night. It was delicious."

My wife and I have an avocado tree here next to our house in Florida with giant, green, ripe-as-all-get-out avocados hanging there even as I lay there dreaming, a fact that I mentioned to Keresthmama. She said, "I know you do. You better get out and pick them. Those sorts of things don't last long, you know."

I never talk about my dreams, because I don't think they're ever much more than the random house-cleaning of my subconscious mind. And maybe that's all this was . . . I don't really know. But I know I told my wife about this dream, and I thought about it hard. The message seemed relatively straight-forward: Enjoy life now, because something bad is coming. Maybe it's just my daytime worries leaking into my nighttime brain. But when my wife mentioned that she'd heard it had snowed in Colorado yesterday, I said, "I don't think she meant a literal snowstorm. I think it was metaphorical."

"Well what was she warning us about then?" my wife asked. She's Argentine, and her family, particularly the women of her culture, takes these things seriously.

I've thought very hard about that question the last couple of days.  As well as that strange combination of avocado and apple butter. Who's ever heard of such a thing? What did my aunt (or my mind) mean by it? I don't know the answer to either question. But I have a feeling about the warning.

My parents were old when they had me and my sisters, so they and their families still remembered the recovery period after the Great Depression. Theirs was a world where little was certain; where family was most important because you didn't know when or if your job could disappear in a crash, or your bank balances in a depression, or your loved ones in an epidemic. They lived frugally, not because they were cheap, but because they wanted a backup plan for when the dark times came again.

I'm wondering, seriously wondering if the dark times aren't coming back again. Now, don't think I'm just being all morbid and pessimistic. Overall I live my life as optimistically as most Americans have done the past forty years, and I've assumed that we had pushed our world to a point where the true dark times of overarching poverty and the risk of starvation and war were just distant memories of our parents and grandparents. Yet, today, I read this story about how the high fuel prices are starting to truly pinch the rural poor. I read this story today on the CBS News website:

Tammy Hastings of Littleton, for example, has cancelled this fall's two planned field trips for her seven home-schooled children. That move alone could save close to $100, since the family fills a Ford E-350 van, which gets just 10 miles to the gallon. Her husband Kevin, meanwhile, is making fewer visits to life insurance clients scattered across the North Country. It's a calculated gamble that could hurt the bottom line on his commission-only job. With cash tight, he barters as much as possible, such as the riding lawn mower he traded this summer for two cords of wood worth about $400.

"We basically just had children, and as we incurred expenses, we worked a little harder to make it all work. But it's becoming harder to make it all work," Kevin says. "This year [in winter], we'll be burning more wood. And this year, I expect we'll be wearing more sweaters."

A part of me reads this and thinks, well, these are the red state voters who've consistently voted against their own interests for years, and here's what they've got for it. Unfair I suppose. It's the "What's the Matter with Kansas?" argument. But I don't even know what their politics are. Sometimes I think we've all been asking that this kind of hardship come back again, since we have so cavalierly lost the lessons we should have learned in the Great Depression.

Here we are, in the Fall of 2005, and the stub of the great corporations are collapsing around our feet. The stub of AT&T is going to disappear completely now that it's being bought out by one of the megacorporate telecommunications companies. And General Motors is in real risk of going bankrupt. The telecomm companies have never been healthy in the past 20 years, but the loss of GM would be a disaster for our culture. The bankruptcy of GM's major parts supplier Delphi, announced yesterday, brings into serious question not only the health of GM, but also the tens and hundreds of other small supplier companies from which they buy.

Now, I know, things change. That's the way of the world. In fact, the global economy is forcing these old companies to change or die. What strikes me so forcefully here, though, is that they will change by going straight back to the world before we learned the lessons of the early twentieth century. GM is taking a hard line when it comes to negotiations with its unions. The Delphi bankruptcy is described as:

".. a shot across the bow of the UAW," says David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research. "It basically says the old game is over, and the new game is survival."

This describes a company (Delphi) that gave bonuses to executives in the days before the bankruptcy declaration in order to try to keep them from leaving. This describes a company and an industry that refuses to ask the government to step in and figure out a way to provide health care to its workers. Those health costs are really what is dragging down GM, not the fact that their employees dare to earn a living wage when everyone else (other than the senior management) is supposed to only make 1 to 2 times the (below the poverty line) minimum wage.

Those in charge want to push the poor down, just when the costs to keep ourselves warm, and to keep ourselves in transportation so we can keep those same jobs they want us to do for less, are suddenly becoming real and tangibly significant proportions of our incomes again. Prices are finally going back to levels that emphasize that an extraction economy only works for so long, then it collapses, as the lumberjacks of New England learned back at the beginning of the twentieth century and about which Robert Frost often wrote so starkly. In "The Census-Taker", a poem from Frost's 1923 book 'New Hampshire', he wrote:

I came as census-taker to the waste
To count the people in it and found none,
None in the hundred miles, none in the house,
Where I came last with some hope, but not much,
After hours' overlooking from the cliffs
An emptiness flayed to the very stone.
I found no people that dared show themselves,
None not in hiding from the outward eye.
The time was autumn, but how anyone
could tell the time of year when every tree
That could have dropped a leaf was down itself
And nothing but the stump of it was left
Now bringing out its rings in sugar of pitch;
And every tree up stood a rotting trunk
Without a single leaf to spend on autumn,
Or branch to whistle after what was spent.

We have worked ourselves into a perfect storm as a species. We climbed to this point in our civilization, and I fear we may have reached our high water mark. No, that probably is too pessimistic. But listening to my aunt (or my own mind, depending on what you choose to believe,) I think we're in for some really bad weather in the next few years. We've forgotten too many important lessons. We've assumed too much. And once again, we've overestimated our own importance in the grand scheme of things. Hurricanes, earthquakes, pandemics, economies tottering on collapse . . .the dark days may soon be here again. And we'll learn all over again that life really is a struggle for survival, especially when you push the system too hard. And we'll learn once again that firewood isn't a luxury item, and trees will be such a necessity of survival for the poor, that our newly reviving forests will end up looking like the vast, tree-empty 

fields of England and Scotland, where the forests were cleared in the time of the wooly-mammoth. And Tammy Hastings of Littleton, NH will find it harder and harder to find firewood to keep all of her children from freezing to death during the long winter nights to come.

I've often wondered if the fact that there are more Democrats in the north and Republicans in the south isn't because of the winter. Winter has a unique ability to get to everyone, even the rich, and remind them that there is poverty in the world, and poverty in a winter world can mean death. Northerners find it easier to remember the lessons, I believe, though, even there, there are still fools. (Possibly Tammy Hastings?) There are fools everywhere, especially in these days.

So what to do? Well, to paraphrase that old chestnut in response to the question, "What do you believe?" I believe I'll have a drink. Nah, I believe I'll go see a movie, say Wallace and Gromit. Nice, uplifting, because you know, tomorrow you never know what's going to happen.

All I can do is try to keep Keresthmama's message in mind: Enjoy the simple things in life while you can . . . . because it's going to snow soon.