Sestina d’Inverno by Anthony Hecht

Here in this bleak city of Rochester,
where there are twenty-seven words for “snow,”
not all of them polite, the wayward mind
basks in some Yucatan of its own making,
some coppery, sleek lagoon, or cinnamon island
alive with lemon tints and burnished natives,

and O that we were there. But here the natives
of this gray, sunless city of Rochester
have sown whole mines of salt about their land
(bare ruined Carthage that it is) while snow
comes down as if The Flood were in the making.
Yet on that ocean Marvell called the mind

an ark sets forth which is itself the mind,
bound for some pungent green, some shore whose natives
blend coriander, cayenne, mint in making
roasts that would gladden the Earl of Rochester
with sinfulness, and melt a polar snow.
It might be well to remember that an island

was blessed heaven once, more than an island,
the grand, utopian dream of a noble mind.
In that kind climate the mere thought of snow
was but a wedding cake; the youthful natives,
unable to conceive of Rochester,
made love, and were acrobatic in the making.

Dream as we may, there is far more to making
do than some wistful reverie of an island,
especially now when hope lies with the Rochester
Gas and Electric Co., which doesn’t mind
such profitable weather, while the natives
sink, like Pompeians, under a world of snow.

The one thing indisputable here is snow,
the single verity of heaven’s making,
deeply indifferent to the dreams of the natives,
and the torn hoarding-posters of some island.
Under our igloo skies the frozen mind
Holds to one truth: it is grey, and called Rochester.

No island fantasy survives Rochester,
where to the natives destiny is snow
that is neither to our mind nor of our making.

Winter, my wonderful car and globalization

Nine inches of snow fell overnight here in Rochester, N.Y., and I had to get out and about this morning before the snowplow crews had time to clear my street.  I thought about my car and how it compared to the first cars I owned back in the 1960s.

Back then, you had to think about whether your car would start on a cold winter morning. To be safe, you had to run your car in neutral the night before for 10 or 15 minutes to charge the battery, and then again in the morning. I never even think about it now.  I just turn the ignition in my 2006 Saturn Ion-2, which of course has an alternator, and I take it for granted that it starts.

When I first moved to Rochester in the mid-1970s, rustproofing your car was a big deal.  I unfortunately made the choice of an inexpensive undercoating job rather than a premium service, and lived to regret it. Now, with my plastic card, rust is not something I have to think about.

Under conditions I drove in this morning, I would have expected to get stuck several times.  I was in fact on the verge of getting stuck a couple of times, but my car had good enough traction to keep going.

Compared to the first cars I owned, my present car is like something out of science fiction.  I won’t even mention the Global Positioning System and the other technological bells and whistles I don’t care about.

General Motors Corp., the maker of my car, is losing money and has divested the Saturn brand. Yet back in the 1960s and 1970s, when quality wasn’t nearly as good as it is today, GM was making money hand over first.  That is what it is to compete in a global economy.

When I was a high school student, I got straight As without having to work hard.  When I sent to college, I found I had many classmates who had straight As in high school.  I studied harder and learned more in college than I ever did in high school, but my grades were not as good.

Likewise with the United States in the world economy.  Our industries have to do better just to hold their own than they once did to reign supreme. But that doesn’t mean we can’t hold our own.

No more bragging about upstate New York snow

I guess I can no longer brag to my friends back in Maryland how severe the winters are in upstate New York. The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reports that Washington, D.C., has had nearly 60 inches of snow this winter and Baltimore has had 80 inches, much of it during the big storm last week. In contrast, here in Rochester, N.Y., we’ve had only 65 inches and no severe blizzards (so far).

The great thing about Rochester is that the community is geared for snow and takes it in stride. Back home, it always came as an unexpected emergency.

When I was a little boy growing up in western Maryland, a snowfall of just 4 or 5 inches would have made me ecstatic. The county superintendent of schools would have been sure to call a “Snow Day” and I would have to day off from school.

Later, as a grown-up newspaperman covering mayor and council meetings in my home city of Hagerstown, Md., I got used to the annual ritual of “economizing” by turning down requests for new snowplows and eliminating contingency funds for snow emergencies.

Some winters, there was hardly any snow at all. And when there was, Bill Potter, the city street superintendent, and his team of mechanical geniuses could somehow get the city’s antique snowplowing equipment working. And if they couldn’t, well – snow will always melt.

All that was 45 or so years ago, and I don’t know how things are now. But it made me appreciate how the Rochester area, including the county and town governments, are organized for winter. Native Rochesterians take for granted the fact that, the morning after a snowstorm, the main roads and streets will be plowed and the side streets will be plowed not too long after. That is not a universal rule.

Here in Rochester, we even have sidewalk snowplowing, which I’d never heard of before I moved here. In Hagerstown, the standard method of keeping sidewalks free of snow and ice was to fine property owners who didn’t. If you were aged or infirm, you’d better be able to hire a teenager to do it for you.

We’ve had blizzards which knocked out electricity and telephone service, including a couple of ice storms over the decades in which service wasn’t restored for weeks. But for the most part, even after the worst storm, life was soon back to normal.

I came to appreciate, as the people in Washington, Baltimore and Hagerstown must, the efforts of the snowplow drivers, the telephone and electric company linemen and all the other people whose efforts make it possible for the rest of us to have food and water, stay warm and go about our daily lives. And it made me appreciate as well the importance of being prepared for the worst, and not gambling with false economies.