Shakespeare's Hamlet said "The memory be green." Obviously, he didn't experience our historic February 6-7, 1978 blizzard. In this case, the memory be white, white, and more WHITE: about 3 drifting feet of it! Not to mention hurricane-force winds, record low barometric pressures, 73 deaths and thousands of injuries in Massachuetts. Do you recall the 3000 cars and 500 trucks that got stranded on Route-128? Brrrrr....think of that next time you're stuck in traffic.

Skiing Commonwealth Ave (Miles Fidelman - Charlestown)
During the blizzard, I was living in a first floor front apartment on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. When I woke up on the first morning of the blizzard, the first thing I noticed was that the power, and thus the heat as well, was out -- then I looked outside, and realized what was going on.

I then called some friend who lived a block away, who fortunately had a gas stove they could use to keep their place warm. I arranged to visit until the power came back on.

When I walked out my front door, I had another surprise. Instead of finding steps leading down to the street, I found that the snow went straight across Comm. Ave., and the mall, to the other side - at the level of the stairtops. After putting on some cross-country skis (fortunately purchased during the previous week's mini-blizzard), I found another surprise - when I put my poles into the snow, they went down about a foot, and then hit the top of a car!

By the end of the first day, the power was on and the streets were plowed (not the cars, though - they were buried for weeks). For a week, though, non-essential traffic was banned, and all but essential stores were closed. Interestingly, banks were considered essential - people couldn't buy food without cash, and this was before the days of ATMs and debit cards).

All in all, it was a nice, week-long vacation. People were out walking the streets, skiing on the Charles, and having a great party.

Given that Boston is cited as having the fastest pace of life in the country, we could probably all use another enforced vacation.

He Coulda Been a Route-128 Statistic (Scott Shurr - Waltham)
The company I worked for on Bear Hill Road in Waltham let us out at 3 the first day of the blizzard. I lived in Dedham at the time and about a mile before my exit the traffic came to a dead stop for quite a while. I saw a police cruiser driving down the breakdown lane and I followed him and got off at my exit. The car sat where I parked it in front of my apartment for the next 3 days.

"Denial" Ain't Just a River in Egypt: It's a Massachusetts Snowdrift (Deborah Bier - Concord)
February 1978 was my second New England winter. I was going to college and living in an apartment in Watertown -- my very first place. My only housemate was away, the cat was at the vet's and I was alone. I wasn't in the habit of listening to radio or watching TV, so I was REALLY alone. I was also, as they say, t-o-t-a-l-l-y clueless.

When it first began to snow, I was undisturbed: this was winter in New England and it was SUPPOSED to do this. Wasn't this place filled with macho people of hearty stock? It kept on snowing. Still, I was not concerned. Ok, then it kept on keeping on snowing. And snowing. Well, the hearty Bostonians had had millenia of this and *I* wasn't going to worry. Finally my aunt called and asked if I was ok. "Ok? Of course I'm OK, why?...Uh, you say it's not supposed to be snowing so much?" This was my first clue, but still, I really didn't fully take in the facts of the situation.

My second clue came when I finally turned on the television. Everyone was pretty excited when they talked about the weather. Ok, so it was TV: I didn't already believe most of what I saw there, so why start now? I was probably the calmest person for 100 miles.

My third clue came sometime after the snow had tapered off. I saw on TV pictures of an automobile (or what was left of one) balanced on top of the bed of some heavy construction equipment which was being used to clear the streets of snow. Funny: it was up there because the snow had been so high it had completely covered the car and rendered it invisible. The first the equipment operator knew of it was when it was already too late. Huh....strange they didn't see the car: it must have been an exceptionally large snowdrift or a very careless plow operator, thought I.

I didn't really pay attention to the final clues: they came when I finally went outside and began to shovel out the driveway. On first inspection, I was impressed with how much snow there seemed to be: I figured there must be more than two feet. I started digging and realized it was going slower than I had imagined it would. Then I noticed there was more snow than I had first thought, but I still wasn't really taking in and making sense of what my eyes were seeing. My brain was still thinking "Oh, there's a bunch of snow here. Let's get to it." After about 20 minutes of shoveling and only about a 2' x 2' area cleared I paused. Then all the information my mind had been denying for days suddenly hit me like a...like a....well, like a full sand truck with no brakes: MY GOD THERE IS AN UNBLIEVABLE AMOUNT OF SNOW OUT HERE! ACRES OF IT! MOUNTAINS! PLANETS' WORTH OF SNOW! AND I AM ALL ALONE! AHHHHH!!!!

I threw down my shovel, ran into the house and didn't put even a toe outside again for nearly 2 days.

Surviving, and The Some (Adam Gaffin - Boston
Somewhere, I still have my "I Survived the Blizzard of 1978" certificate, the one I picked up in Harvard Square a couple of days after the storm. I like knowing I have it, but don't expect me to try to find it - it's a sore point with my wife, who wasn't in Boston back then and who has just had enough with people talking about that damn storm as if it were the defining moment of a generation.

I was a freshman at Brandeis University in Waltham, living in a dorm on the side of a hill. So we had plenty of room for sledding on the cafeteria trays that seemed to appear out of nowhere - in our nice little "valley" shielded from the wind.

Then the lights went out. A freak lightning bolt zapped a nearby transformer and took out our power. And even that was kind of fun - especially for us New Yorkers who knew we didn't have to worry about looting or rioting like the blackout we'd lived through the summer before.

But then the lights stayed out. For a couple of days. With everybody crowded into the dorm, everybody promptly got sick. Trudging up the hill to the cafeteria became a major ordeal. You learned who your friends were - the ones willing to bring food back down for you.

That certificate? Two days after the snow stopped, the only things running were the trains. So, with nothing else to do, I took the train to Cambridge, walked to the square and saw somebody hawking the things. It's a good thing I knew somebody at Harvard - I had to have one, even though it meant I'd be a quarter short for the trainfare back. Fortunately, she had a quarter to lend me. I still owe it to her...