By PLS
You discover them when the going gets tough. When a major winter storm hits, for example.
El Niño has been dumping lots of snow on Santa Fe this year. First came a foot of snow just before Christmas. Hurrah! A white Christmas! A week later two more feet of white stuff accumulated. Beautiful! I live in Santa Fe partly because its 7000 foot altitude makes for a real winter, so I was elated.
But Santa Fe isn’t used to that much snow at one time. Crews and equipment couldn’t keep up, and some local streets still haven’t been plowed. The road up the hill I live on got one poorly calibrated pass with a grader. No sand. No gravel. No salt.
Usually the sun melts snow and ice fairly quickly at this latitude, but not this time. The temperature is hovering barely above the freezing point even at midday. When, finally, spots of tire-gripping bare dirt poked through the ice on the slope in front of my house, it was time for a fresh snow fall, to start the glazing process all over again. Just last night another four inches fell. 
Having traded in my sturdy old Jeep for a Honda Civic Hybrid about a year ago, I was marooned for nearly five days last week. The Civic couldn’t make the grade on the icy uphill climb. Fortunately, the fridge was full of Christmas leftovers, so I couldn’t starve. Also, since I live close to the city center, it’s a quick round trip on foot for necessities, one more excuse to be out in a gorgeous winter landscape.
Others weren’t so fortunate. People were stranded on the Interstates. Stores ran out of supplies because trucks weren’t getting through. (There was a run on snow shovels, sand and salt, with the shelves quickly going bare.) Rushing people to the hospital was an iffy proposition. Flat roofs not designed for the weight of so much snow collapsed or leaked. Cattle began starving and even suffering from thirst, because (I just learned this) they don’t lap up snow when water’s not available.
Believe it or not, the US postal service floundered, too. One mail truck actually got stuck right in front of my house. The driver couldn't get it up the hill and slewed off the road while trying to retreat with a U turn. That day the post office announced that many Santa Fe streets would have no mail deliveries until conditions improved, which they didn’t, for days. Remember that old proclamation about how neither rain, sleet, snow, etc., etc., will keep the mailman from his appointed rounds? That was then. This is now. No wonder UPS is taking business away from the Postal Service. The era of heroes is over.
So it wasn’t all Christmas card stuff, this blanket of snow. Especially since state, county and city equipment—and management, I believe—weren’t up to the demands of dealing with the accumulation of lovely little flakes that kept coming down for two days and a night, the heaviest snow fall in some 59 years. As a consequence, not only passenger cars were getting stuck. Pick up trucks and SUVs, much to the surprise of their over-confident drivers, slithered into trouble, too.
But here’s the glory of it. Strangers always rushed in to help. Cheerfully. Good Samaritans.
It happened to me, too. A man and his wife, driving ahead of me, noticed—in their rear view mirror, I suppose—that I’d slid into a snow bank and couldn’t get out. They stopped, walked back to my car and started pushing. Eventually, we found a board to ram behind a front wheel. I put the car into reverse, they pushed again, the wheel rolled onto the board, which gave me just enough traction to get under way.
Getting stuck like that is actually a good experience. You learn that people come through for one another in a pinch.
Another morning I’d gone for my newspaper on foot—yes, I can read it on the Web, but I like a paper paper with my morning coffee. I was clumping along an unplowed street, when I came across a woman who’d fallen on the icy sidewalk, the state of the sidewalk being the reason I'd chosen the street. Two other people had stopped to check on the woman. We all wanted to know what we could do. She’d been a bit shaken up, she told us, so she wanted to rest there for a few moments, leaning against a pile of snow, recovering. “I’ve got a cell phone,” she said. “I can call for help if I need it.” Well, yes! But meanwhile, we hovered, making sure she wasn’t concussed, that she knew what she was doing, that we couldn’t help her up and steady her. We could bring her some coffee, for that matter. The store was only a hundred yards away. Eventually she persuaded us that she could take care of the situation. Seven minutes later, only her sitzmark was there. She was gone.
On that same street, most days, people pass one another without a word or a glance. Very few respond with any grace or enthusiasm to a “Good morning!” I’ve discovered—except when you have a dog. People feel free to talk to animals, not people, evidently, until they’re caught in a storm, a blizzard, a catastrophe. That dissolves the barriers to human interaction, kindness, concern.
A big snow storm also brings neighbors together. Talking about the storm and the necessary coping mechanisms, semi-strangers become “we.” Across the street from me, an old house had recently been renovated, but I barely knew the new owner. Then came the storm, and we were chatting—at the top of our lungs—as we shoveled and shoveled and shoveled our driveways. Before the job was over, I suggested we’d earned a nice glass of wine and invited her over. She volunteered to bring some chocolates. We spent two hours together. The snow had broken the ice, so to speak.
During the worst of the big storm, a family in a remote rural area along Interstate 40 was even more hospitable. They took in over 40 stranded motorists for a couple of days. The kids had a ball. The grownups slept on the floor. The house had only one bathroom, but the group worked it out. A year from now, I predict, memories will be uniformly positive: the amazing experience of sharing those cold snowy days of being stranded with a group of perfect strangers who instinctively did the right thing by one another.
There are angels, it seems. It just takes the snow to bring them out.