Not reassuring when weathermen say ‘Today will be terrible but don’t worry it won’t be as terrible as tomorrow or Friday’.
― Jonah Goldberg
Weather maps are omens. Little oracles that provide information for the future Roadmaps for coming events. I love watching the weather. It is the one portion of the news where they tell you what will happen. While the rest of the “cast” is telling you what already happened, recent history to be sure, the weather man is giving you tomorrow.
Traffic and weather follow each other on the morning news. They try to work together to predict when things will go bad. However, one five car pileup throws a wrench in everything. And I do mean everything. Traffic everywhere is thrown into chaos, as people try to adjust. Side streets, freeways, back roads all feel the brunt of the people fleeing the congestion, winding through neighborhoods, trying to avoid the congested mass of parked cars, swollen egos, and angry, frustrated race car/stunt men drivers.
Soon, almost everywhere is backed up, and nothing is moving. Nobody had any idea it was going to happen. Not the poor tardy fools who were driving too close to stop when traffic slowed. Certainly not the traffic girl on television.
The weather person is the calm in the storm. Sometimes a real storm, with crashing thunder and lightning filling the sky. There is a magic radar add-on to count the number of lightning strikes in an area. Sometimes it is a big storm, you can watch it unfold in full color, vivid, worrisome reds, troubling yellows and comforting greens representing the severity of the precipitation. Software modeling allows for a predictive timeline with arrivals and departures from the various neighborhoods and suburbs.
“Back to Jen[1], in the traffic center.”
“Traffic is starting to back up on the northern outer-belt.” Jen is thorough, and she has a tough job, but the traffic map is just so much visual noise pollution. And mostly, if she has any news at all it is bad.
And then the news anchors will come back on. Friendly, familiar faces, in a bright, cheerful setting, joking, laughing, a family of two. Another mass shooting, another airplane crash. The stock market tumbles, the price of gasoline climbs, children abused, immigrants locked in cages, crime, corruption all delivered with a solemn, terrible countenance between bouts of unsettling good-natured delight that can almost appear cruel when laced so tightly around such awful news.
Like clockwork, the weather person will come on, a time line of temperatures, and cloud cover, rain, snowfall, or bright sunshine. Of all the on air staff, the weather person is the most reassuring Jacket weather, head for the beach, or break out the snow shovels, sunscreen, big floppy hats to provide a little shade, or stocking hats and mittens, news you can use.
Sure, occasionally, the traffic report will be useful, but, it almost always happens after I leave for work, then I’m stuck, with all the people who left too early to see the report. If only it could be more like the weather. “Truck turns over on the Main Street exit, traffic will be awful, several commuters will perish, and others may resort to cannibalism to survive. Remember to bring a camp stove and utensils.” Never anything quite so useful, though.
Leaving the house in the proper attire and with enough time to scrape the frost off the windshield is a public service.
[1] Not her real name.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock