Vermont Winter Reconsidered

Not my photo, but it was one of my bad choices!

When I drive into town in the winter and see kids waiting for the bus wearing hoodies and sneakers in February, I often wonder at what age do humans experience WRP (weather-related pain). My theory is that we begin to feel symptoms in our late 20s and WRP full onset comes when we hit 30.

Several of you have made nice comments in texts, emails, or postings about my memories of Vermont winters. Now I must confess that most of my best pre-WRP days came before I reached the big 3-0. I’m more than twice as old now, but 30 bothered me more than any of the other Big-Zero birthdays I’ve had. Maybe it was because I was a teen when Young Turks insisted, “Never trust anyone over 30.” I think, though a 13-year-old eight grader named Julie is the reason.

I contend that hell is a place where bad people must monitor an eighth-grade study hall for eternity. I really liked Julie; she was spunky and funny, but her energy could test the patience of a saint. Especially in study hall! Trying to get “Jules” to sit for 45 minutes was like telling an avalanche to stop being annoying. My birthday is in March–decidedly a winter month in Vermont–and the very day I turned 30, Jules bounded up to my desk and said, “Mr. W, Mr. W., did you know that Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?” I ran my fingers through my hair and replied, “You mean The Beatles?” Said she, “Yes, have you ever heard of them?” When I scooped my jaw from the floor I told her, “Jules I promise to explain this to you tomorrow, but right now I need you to go back to your seat and leave me alone, or I might have to kill you.”

You can put Julie’s question in my box of remembrances of how I fell out of love with Vermont winters. She instantly made me feel like a dinosaur peering into the sky and wondering what those giant rock hurtling toward Earth portended. To add insult to injury, at age 31 I fell prey to WRP.

In 1983, Burlington held its inaugural First Night celebration. It wasn’t unusual for Lake Champlain to freeze over, but that usually didn’t occur in mid-December. The Vermont side of Champlain is usually warmer than the New York side, which lies in the shadow of the High Adirondacks. When it does freeze at Burlington, the winds from New York can sweep across a 12-mile ice sheet. One New Year’s Eve the temperature was well below zero as we marched down Winooski Avenue behind giant Bread and Circus puppets. Even dressed head to toe in insulated clothing it was like a cartoon in which we expected our words to freeze in midair and shatter.

That February we had a massive Friday snow storm in which flakes fell so hard everyone at the high school was sure they were going to send us all home. It didn’t happen and it was a tossup who was more off the rails, the students or the faculty. It took me over an hour to drive the four miles to home. I was crestfallen to see a solid blanket of deep snow in the driveway. Only someone burnt would I attempt what might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. I backed up until I could gain traction, gunned the engine, and slid into the drive. Call me Rocket Man.  I came to rest starring at the sky through my windshield with an acre of snow under the car’s frontend. It took hours to shovel it level to the drive and chisel snow from the engine. WRP supremo.

The following winter was the Great Blue Freezie caper. On a subzero morning I got a call from a colleague who lived ten miles north asking if I could come get him as his car wouldn’t start. We almost made it to school before my car halted outside of town where the Lamoille River tumbles over a power dam. I opened the hood, and witnessed a ten-inch column of blue ice coming from the radiator. Yes, friend, my anti-freeze froze. People stop if they see a disabled vehicle because one could die from exposure. We were delivered to school by a kind man in a pickup reeking of rancid oil and roughly as clean.

My last Vermont winter was quite a treat as well. It wasn’t all that cold, but the first snowfall came on October 15. We never got a blizzard, but it snowed a few inches a day through mid-April. Doable? Not really. By March there was nowhere to put the snow! It was the same winter our adventurous tabby Garp got stuck in a tree, but that’s a striped tale/tail for another time.

Moving to Western Mass for grad school was like landing in Miami. My new take on the Green Mountain State is that for six months of the year there’s no better place to be. The other six are called winter and I’m on medical leave.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

The Scarecrow: A Michael Connelly Thriller

 

 

 

 

THE SCARECROW (2009)

By Michael Connelly

Little, Brown and Company, 2009, 419 pages.

★★★★

 

At first, I didn’t think The Scarecrow was up to par with other Michael Connelly crime thrillers, but the more pages I turned, the more I was engrossed. This “scarecrow” is similar to the farmer’s decoy only in the sense that its intent is to scare away threats to the “farm,” secret, anonymous, and (in theory) untraceable transactions on the dark web. You can assume that most of those activities are illegal: selling weapons, looting accounts, spreading malware, running prostitution rings, payments for assassinations, and moving drugs. The sites are often called “onion routing” as they work by encrypting multiple layers of the web as if each was an onion peel. The scarecrow in this novel nefarious tech genius/serial killer who constructs those layers* and makes the onion nearly impossible to peel.

 

The Scarecrow features journalist Jack McEvoy, whom readers know from Connelly’s novels The Poet  1996) and its sequel The Narrows (2004), perennial fan favorites. McEvoy’s (fictional) brother was among the Poet’s gruesomely murdered victims. Connelly puts a lot of himself into McEvoy in The Scarecrow. Connelly, like McEvoy, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Unlike McEvoy, Connelly left journalism before the Times began mass layoffs. Connelly often includes current events in his novels. Big city newspapers began losing readership in the 1980s, but 2009, the year The Scarecrow was published in the United States, was when major layoffs became front-page news.

 

Connelly pulled off a bold tactic in The Scarecrow in that we know the identities of two of the bad guys before we know anything else. McGinnis thinks he runs Western Data, a security “farm,” but Wesley Carver, his scarecrow in charge of the servers, is the real power. He’s a brilliant MIT grad, but also a nefarious murderer. Meanwhile back at the Times, word has come down that 100 employees are subject to a RIF (Reduction in Force) and Jack is number 99. He’s less upset than you might imagine; he’s burned out but needs the dough so he stays on for another two weeks to train his replacement, the vivacious Angela Cook. Angela is bright, but relatively inexperienced and willing to work for about a third of what Jack makes.

 

Jack plans to go out in glory. After printing an account of the arrest of Alonzo Winslow, a 16-year-old, for murder Jack is lambasted by the suspect's grandmother who claims that Alonzo stole the car in which a woman’s body was found but didn’t kill her. Although Alonzo is a foul-mouthed drug-dealer, Jack comes to suspect Alonzo, though a vile jerk, is not guilty and was browbeaten into a confession because he’s a young gang member (the Crips). If Jack can prove that, he can probably win another Pulitzer and write a book about racial injustice. He holds his cards close to his vest, but Angela tips him off to a dark web site about trunk murders with similar MOs involving braces, sexual assault, and strangulation. Little do either Angela or Jack know that the very act of viewing the site trips a “manwire” that allows Carver to trace them and seek to ruin and/or murder Jack.

 

Jack flies to Nevada to interview a trunk murderer imprisoned there, but finds his cellphone is compromised, his back account is empty, all his passwords have been stolen, his interview has been pushed back, and he doesn’t have enough money to drive his rental car back to LA. Trust me when I say that this is merely the tip of the iceberg for Jack. He does, however, manage to touch base with Rachel Walling, his former lover and an FBI agent. Some passion is rekindled; though a roll in the hay literally saves Jack’s life, it also gets Rachel fired.

 

The Scarecrow becomes a test of wits between individuals who break rules for differing reasons and when told to keep their hands out of the fire thrust them into the flames to see what will happen. There will be collateral damage. Connelly once again masterfully builds enough tension for nails to be bitten to the quick. Pity the poor crow that sits on Wesley Carver’s shoulder.

 

Rob Weir

 

* Good uses of the dark web include protecting journalist sources and communicating with those in the witness protection program.