She took off her drenched coat and gloves and called Janice. "You promised you’d call as soon as you got there," Janice said reproachfully. "Are you all right?"
"I’m fine," Bev said. "I was out walking around the Plaza." She didn’t say anything about its raining. She didn’t want Janice saying, I told you so. "It’s beautiful here."
"I should have come with you," Janice said. "It’s snowing like crazy here. Ten inches so far. I suppose you’re sitting on a patio drinking a margarita right now."
"Sangria," Bev lied. "I’m going sightseeing this afternoon. The houses here are all pink and tan adobe with bright blue and red and yellow doors. And right now the whole town’s decorated with luminarias. You should see them."
"I wish I could," Janice sighed. "All I can see is snow. I have no idea how I’m going to get to the store. Oh, well, at least we’ll have a white Christmas. It’s so sad Howard can’t be here to see this. He always loved white Christmases, didn’t he?"
Howard, consulting the Farmer’s Almanac, reading the weather forecast out loud to her, calling her over to the picture window to watch the snow beginning to fall, saying, "Looks like we’re going to get a white Christmas this year," as if it were a present under the tree, putting his arm around her–
"Yes," Bev managed to say through the sudden, searing stab of pain. "He did."
It was spitting snow when Warren Nesvick checked into the Marriott in Baltimore. As soon as he got Shara up to the suite, he told her he had to make a business call, "and then I’ll be all yours, honey." He went down to the lobby. The TV in the corner was showing a weather map. He looked at it for a minute and then got out his cell phone.
"Where are you?" his wife Marjean said when she answered.
"In St. Louis," he said. "Our flight got rerouted here because of snow at O’Hare. What’s the weather like there?"
"It’s snowing," she said. "When do you think you’ll be able to get a flight out?"
"I don’t know. Everything’s booked because of it being Christmas Eve. I’m waiting to see if I can get on standby. I’ll call you as soon as I know something," and hung up before she could ask him which flight.
It took Nathan an hour and a half to drive the fifteen miles to the lab. During the ride he considered the likelihood that this was really a discontinuity and not just a major snowstorm. Global warming proponents (and opponents) confused the two all the time. Every hurricane, tornado, heat wave, or dry spell was attributed to global warming, even though nearly all of them fell well within the range of normal weather patterns.
And there had been big December snowstorms before. The blizzard of 1888, for instance, and the Christmas Eve storm of 2002. And Chin was probably wrong about there being no center to the low pressure system. The likely explanation was that there was more than one system involved–one centered in the Great Lakes and another just east of the Rockies, colliding with warm, moist air from the Gulf Coast to create unusually widespread snow.
And it was widespread. The car radio was reporting snow all across the Midwest and the entire East Coast–Topeka, Tulsa, Peoria, northern Virginia, Hartford, Montpelier, Reno, Spokane. No, Reno and Spokane were west of the Rockies. There must be a third system, coming down from the Northwest. But it was still hardly a discontinuity.
The lab parking lot hadn’t been plowed. He left the car on the street and struggled through the already knee-deep snow to the door, remembering when he was halfway across the expanse that Nebraska was famous for pioneers who got lost going out to the barn in a blizzard and whose frozen bodies weren’t found till the following spring.
He reached the door, opened it, and stood there a moment blowing on his frozen hands and looking at the TV Chin had stuck on a cart in the corner of the lab. On it, a pretty reporter in a parka and a Mickey Mouse hat was standing in heavy snow in front of what seemed to be a giant snowman. "The snow has really caused problems here at Disney World," she said over the sound of a marching band playing "White Christmas." "Their annual Christmas Eve Parade has–"
"Well, it’s about time," Chin said, coming in from the fax room with a handful of printouts. "What took you so long?"
Nathan ignored that. "Have you got the IPOC data?" he asked.
Chin nodded. He sat down at his terminal and started typing. The upper left-hand screen lit up with columns of numbers.
"Let me see the National Weather Service map," Nathan said, unzipping his coat and sitting down at the main console.
Chin called up a U.S. map nearly half-covered with blue, from western Oregon and Nevada east all the way to the Atlantic and up through New England and south to the Oklahoma panhandle, northern Mississippi, Alabama, and most of Georgia.
"Good Lord, that’s even bigger than Marina in ’92," Nathan said. "Have you got a satellite photo?"
Chin nodded and called it up. "And this is a real-time composite of all the data coming in, including weather stations, towns, and spotters reporting in. The white’s snow," he added unnecessarily.
The white covered even more territory than the blue on the NWS map, with jagged fingers stretching down into Arizona and Louisiana and west into Oregon and California. Surrounding them were wide uneven pink bands. "Is the pink rain?" Nathan asked.
"Sleet," Chin said. "So what do you think? It’s a discontinuity, isn’t it?"
"I don’t know," Nathan said, calling up the barometric readings and starting through them.
"What else could it be? It’s snowing in Orlando. And San Diego."
"It’s snowed both of those places before," Nathan said. "It’s even snowed in Death Valley. The only place in the U.S. where it’s never snowed is the Florida Keys. And Hawaii, of course. Everything on this map right now is within the range of normal weather events. You don’t have to start worrying till it starts snowing in the Florida Keys."
"What about other places?" Chin asked, looking at the center right-hand screen.
"What do you mean, other places?"
"I mean, it isn’t just snowing in the U.S. I’m getting reports from Cancun. And Jerusalem."
At eleven-thirty Pilar gave up trying to explain that there wasn’t enough snow to make a snowman and took Miguel outside, bundled up in a sweatshirt, a sweater, and his warm jacket, with a pair of Pilar’s tube socks for mittens. He lasted about five minutes.
When they came back in, Pilar settled him at the kitchen table with crayons and paper so he could draw a picture of a snowman and went into the living room to check the weather forecast. It was really snowing hard out there, and she was getting a little worried about taking Miguel down to Escondido. Los Angelenos didn’t know how to drive in snow, and Pilar’s tires weren’t that good.
"–snowing here in Hollywood," said a reporter standing in front of the nearly invisible Hollywood sign, "and this isn’t special effects, folks, it’s the real thing."
She switched channels. "–snowing in Santa Monica," a reporter standing on the beach was saying, "but that isn’t stopping the surfers. . . ."
Click. "–para la primera vez en cincuenta anos en Marina del Rey–"
Click. "–snowing here in LA for the first time in nearly fifty years. We’re here on the set of XXX II with Vin Diesel. What do you think of the snow, Vin?"
She gave up and went back in the kitchen where Miguel announced he was ready to go outside again. She talked him into listening to Alvin and the Chipmunks instead. "Okay," he said, and she left him warbling "White Christmas" along with Alvin and went in to check the weather again. The Santa Monica reporter briefly mentioned the roads were wet before moving on to interview a psychic who claimed to have predicted the snowstorm, and on a Spanish-language channel she caught a glimpse of the 405 moving along at its usual congested pace.