Imagine a Twilight Zone episode that occurs in a mobile home park. There is the usual cast of characters. The evil park owner who cares about nothing but money (think oil executives in The Wages of Fear); The busybody who is in everyone’s business; the town drunk; the conspiracy theorist who get his news from social media; the nice couple with good kids; the Second Amendment head-case. It starts to rain, and does not stop. The park owner speeds through in his red Tesla S with a bumper sticker that says There is No Planet B and his bimbonic trophy wife, tosses a Starbucks cup out the window, and speeds away. The crazy guy with thick glasses who sees the future makes scary noises. It rains so hard that the grounds flood. Everyone gathers on top of a raised septic bed that the town forced the owner to install, at crippling expense, three years prior shortly after the progressive Democrats won a super-majority in the state legislature. People build structures on top of the septic tumulus using spare R-board, OSB and skirting panels that are stored in the pole barn, but their efforts can’t stop the rain falling. Eventually everyone drowns in a thick sludge of rain-water, runoff and shit. The only survivors are a seven-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl, who are able to climb into an inflated kiddie pool that is too small to carry an adult, but just big enough for the two of them. The are last seen bobbing off like a cork, in the direction of where the city called New Rome used to be.
(The sequel would not get past the censors of the late 1950s and early 1960s. It would be called Blue Lagoon, and it would be set in the ruins of post climate apocalypse New Rome. Most of the action would consist of the now-seventeen-and-nineteen year-old survivors of the Flood making babies to repopulate New New Rome.)
You don’t have to wait for Rod Sterling to come back to produce that show and release it on Hulu, because it happened over the past few days. Life has imitated art – only this time, it is snow, instead of rain.
Wednesday of last week, Mike, the manager of my park in northern New York, told me that they were going to get hit with a big snow storm. “They are saying six feet”, he told me. That made me pause. We have not had any snow yet, and the fall has, until the last few days, been very warm. And anyhow, snow is passé. I said,
“You mean, six inches, right?”
“No – six feet”.
“Well, at least you aren’t Canadian.”
“Are they going to get more?”
“No. But they have to measure it in meters.”
At 10:06 on Friday morning, my phone farted, and this came out:
This is Maggie Malone lot 7 Gamma. Mike just plowed at 9:30. I was stuck in the road in front of my parking area for over an hour trying to get unstuck so I can go to work. I’m loosing 8 hours of pay. The neighbors are stuck now can’t get out. People down the road are snow blowing or shoveling their roads. If I have to pay a plow company to plow this road so I can get work I will be taking that off my lot rent as well as the income I lost today. We have never had this issue till Mike took over plowing.
At 10:23, it farted again. That time, it said that Mike swore at the boyfriend when the boyfriend said that Mike showed up too late, and that Mike laughed and twirled his moustache because Maggie would be late to work. It also said that he had been fired from managing another park nearby.[1]
I did not call Mike to ask him about Maggie’s texts, because I did not want to bother him while he was, well, digging people out. When I spoke with him later in the day, he told me that, when he woke up at 5:00 that morning, it had not yet started snowing. By six, everything was blanketed and it was coming down so fast that the state troopers had closed the roads to all but emergency traffic. The trip from his house to the park, which usually takes half an hour, took two hours. That’s why he was late.
I think he probably did say “fuck you” to the boyfriend. That is not perfect, but it sounds like a reasonable human response to an unreasonable situation.
On Saturday at 10:02, I received the following email, from a resident who is good with math and computers, but who is something of a kvetch:
The neighbors and we are having problems with the snow plowing that is being done here. Yesterday we spent 3 hours helping people out of the ditch in the park, just from in front of our place to the road going up the hill. My husband couldn’t even get into our driveway because there was a huge pile of snow from the plowed part of the road to the parking spot, which was over 25′. Busy was too busy to help anyone stuck. We are getting plowed IN…not out. After talking to the neighbors around here, we found out they have also been complaining to him as we did, the last few years, about how he puts the snow INTO our driveways, only plows one car width throughout, and is more focused on his plowing for “other customers”. There are no trailers across the road from us here, but he insists on driving so the plow shoots the snow towards our driveways, instead of the empty area across the road from us. We complained emphatically to him last year about it, but apparently we aren’t the only ones. We’re tired of the lack of caring on his part. He’s paid to plow us out, and do a decent job. Our rent keeps going up, but our service keeps lacking. If you like, I’ll give the neighbors your email address so you can see we aren’t the only ones angry about it.
That resident brings this issue up each year. When Mike plows, the edge of the plow blade leaves a berm of compacted, balled-up snow perpendicular to her driveway.[2] We have explained that the problem is that the snowplow does not make snow disappear – it just moves it from one place to another. That resident is usually a very mild-mannered, agreeable lady (she is Canadian, for fuck’s sake), but we butt heads on this issue every December.
A little over an hour before that, I received a call from another resident. I was swinging a kettlebell when the phone rang, so I let it go to voice mail. Here is what he said:
Hi, it’s Jim Brown from 17 Zeta over the trailer park. I just want to let you know, Mike is trying to do the best he can this we got a crazy amount of snow up here. He’s doing the best he can. I’m on call right now to help him in case he gets stuck, to pull him out with my truck if he gets stuck. He’s already got stuck like four times. We got so much crazy snow in one amount of time. That was crazy. I’ve been out along with the fire department and gone on numerous fire calls for car accidents and everything else around here. I just want to let you know. Mike is doing the best he can, brother. He really is…..I mean, he’s doing the best he can he really is. So if you’re getting a lot of calls from people in the trailer park, they just don’t understand how much snow we got and the amount of time it came down. Thanks, boss. Bye.
And here’s an email that I received today, from another resident:
Writing u let u know mike is doing the best he can with no help and he been doing more that he don’t have to help people he and if people call u and say he’s not they r lieing just because he couldn’t get to them when the called or could do more but there’s alot of snow I can’t even do what I use to do for my place he ask me every morning how it is and I tell him and he is here to do it he does alot I’m proud of him they won’t get another worker to go out of he’s way like mike does have a nice holiday.
Since I am not on-site, I need to read the tea leaves. What the data points tell me so far is that, (i) the snow that has fallen on Western New York and parts of the North country was likely caused by increased humidity in the air due to climate change-induced warmer temperatures on the Great Lakes and is of biblical proportions, (ii) you can’t please everyone, (iii) Mike is working harder than anyone can be expected to plow the snow, (iv) He is not perfect, but he’s pretty damn good, (v) the perfect is the enemy of the good, and (vi) good is the best you can hope for when you are faced with an act of God.
I might write the Twilight Zone episode and shop it around to streaming services. The ending will be fun to write. A resident whose boyfriend curses out the manager for arriving late after he swims through shark-infested waters to do his job will turn blue and die a slow and painful death as her windpipe is slowly constricted after she is bitten by water moccasins, and a picky Canadian woman will learn gratitude when she is rescued from a Loch Ness-type monster by the park manager, who she has done nothing but nag since the opening credits. That would be a solace. We create art because it is more perfect than life.
[1] I have heard the story of Mike and the nearby park before. Mike quit that job. The owner offered him $10,000 to come back. She called me to tell me that she was trying to hire him back, and to ask if it would be OK if we shared him. I told her that Mike was a grown-up and he could do what he wanted although, of course, I hoped he could continue to give my park priority. When I asked Mike about it, he told me that I was a decent guy, that owner was a bitch, that park was a shit-hole, and that no amount of money could entice him to go back there. I hope he continues to feel that way.
[2] Contrary to popular belief, the Inuit do not have fifty-three separate words for snow. As I understand it, their language has complex inflectional morphology, which can give rise to many permutations of the ‘snow’ morpheme, but they can do the same with any other morpheme. See, e.g. Pullum, The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, U. Chicago Press, 1991. That said, if the Inuit did have 53 words for ‘snow’, one of them would be translatable as ‘berm-left-by-snowplow-blade’.
Readers who are familiar with Yupik morphology are invited to correct my understanding thereof.