Blizzard suspends fear
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The voice is flat and robotic but nonetheless pierces the discreet hum of the National Air and Space Museum: "Attention in the museum, attention in the museum …."
The pregnant pause that follows means something entirely different to the gut than it would have two years or even two weeks ago, before "Terror Alert High."
So does Virginia's interstate no-hitchhiking sign along I-95. The simple crossed-out thumbs-up hints to newcomers, "If you think everything's going to be OK, think again."
As it turns out in the museum, a high-school kid has gotten separated from his bus. There is no need for us to hold our breaths and evacuate the building or act out some other absurd scene that belongs in a doomsday action movie.
If only the speaker could add some reassuring inflection to his voice, we — the undaunted, apparently brave visitors to the heart of the nation's capital — wouldn't have to reach so deep to pull our hearts from our stomachs.
Such is the state of the American psyche in the heart of the nation's capital, a place where an orange terror alert somehow ceases to be a comfortably distant "Saturday Night Live" punch line.
Yet, for a precious few days over the President's Day weekend, the fear is smothered in white.
As the first snowflakes begin to fall, then plummet, then accumulate to near-record proportions, a more immediate concern replacs the scramble for duct tape and plastic sheeting: How in the world am I going to shovel out the car?
Perhaps the rest of our worried nation could use such a storm, a blinding white antidote to fear.
The brave few are gathered around the Washington Monument, gazing into a dreary, snowy sky, some surely wondering whether a rogue plane or an anti-aircraft missile will come into view.
Mothers endure the cold with their pink-cheeked toddlers, waiting outside the Air and Space Museum for their turn to remove their coats and submit to metal-detecting wands.
The National Mall echoes with music from a surly saxophonist, who offeres the opening notes of "Sesame Street" to elicit some change from a pregnant woman.
Meanwhile, a homeless man declares that he won't seek shelter — terrorism and impending blizzard be damned — because he "likes the outdoors."
Over the weekend, The Washington Post conducts a telephone survey of how 600 area folks are reacting to the heightened terror alert.
The survey finds that 75 percent are worried about a terrorist attack in the region and that nearly half fear they personally will be a victim.
But for those willing to come to a place that news reports suggest could become a new Ground Zero at any moment, the fear is mostly buried somewhere between denial and resignation.
At any other time, a blizzard in a densely populated metro area would be something to curse, especially one that forces the governor of Maryland to declare driving without just cause illegal.
But here, for this moment, the idea of being trapped in a home by Mother Nature — and not a dirty bomb – is somehow liberating.
Like the water rendered inert by freezing temperatures, the region's fear of terror is temporarily put on hold.
MSNBC and Fox News are unrelenting with their perpetual "Terror Alert: High" screen labels — but no one here can see it through the snowblind.
The local news heads talking about machine-gun-wielding guards on the Capitol steps disappears, suddenly, giving way to goofy weather personalities rooting for a few more tenths of an inch at Reagan National so the official snow total can be all the more historic.
The busloads of high school students visiting the Lincoln Memorial turn their attention away from the barricades and police trucks blocking passages and to the more immediate threat: the embarrassment of slipping on an icy sidewalk in front of their peers.
Then, as soon as it came, it's gone.
Skies clear, and life begins to emerge once again. Eyes squint at the first sunlight reflecting off a wholly white landscape. Blacktop emerges; customers find gas stations finally open for business.
For three days, talk of Colin Powell's presentation before the United Nations and talk of movable chemical weapons labs is silent.
Then, the sun's rays compel the long thaw, lighting places people don't want to see.
A familiar, unwelcome normalcy returns.
