Mud-Season

Woke up, it was a Chernobyl morning

 and the first thing I heard

 was an earthquake chorus under my bed

 and a thunder-snow storm wrote the sound.   JM.

No shit, we had an earthquake Tuesday morning in a snow storm, replete with lightning, thunder and a wind storm that sounded like a freight train outside of the house.  It came just after first light, that was grey and dingy, bleak, with pissy rain-snow and a cold north wind.  The third day into our quarantine, our national sequestration against the virus, it felt like we were in an oppressive communist state. The end of days.

But I do a disservice to the people of Chernobyl who woke up to a nuclear accident and subsequent contamination that was measured in Scandinavia and killed perhaps 100,000 although only 100 were officially reported.   Sure we are on lock down from a deadly virus, our economy is in the tubes and we don’t know how this will affect us or when this will end, but it still beats living in Chernobyl, I like to think.

We have our first world complaints here in Park City.  It’s mud-season, between winter and spring in the mountains, but the ski resorts are all closed despite a 10 foot base and a half foot of new snow each day.  The trails are all muddy, the backyard is full of 6 months’ worth of dog crap and downed branches while the roads and bike paths are all too wet and cold for a road bike, mountain bike or motorcycle.  

I used to spend the entire mud season at the Alamo or The Club, drinking endless beers, watching the Islanders and then Wayne Gretzky win Stanley Cups.  Now there is no freaking NHL!  It feels like suspended in-animation.  The town has cleared out of workers and tourists and is ghost town empty with a spooky feeling, like Mayberry RFD with snow and no Opie.

After watching some panicky TV coverage of the earthquake with shockey, neophyte field-reporters frantically running around, showing clueless, hard-hat workers catatonic-ally picking up bricks underneath a wall half-collapsed.   People deal with stress and catastrophe differently and not always logically.  I get it that the quake was more severe and freaky in SLC but It seemed almost comical - since no one died or got hurt.  One wide shot showed five TV correspondence together with all of them looking at their phones, reading what they found.  If I need the news, I guess I can look at my own phone, so I turned off the TV.  We have a new rule during sequestration… no TV or drinking before 500 PM.

So we did what any red, white and blue blooded American would do, we took a hot tub until the sun came out and then took a long walk in the meadow and counted our blessings.  Many have it much worse.  The sun, sky and the clouds were refreshingly immune to everything below and the earth laughed and breathed a sigh of relief that mother nature was finally getting even with those who continually ignore her.  Economic collapse, earthquakes and extinction are options. The end of the world as we know it, but I feel fine.