Eric Dimbleby: White Out

Somewhere out there—in the distance, on a street, in an alley, in the back of a cab, at the grocer, in a pub, cuddled beneath warm blankets in their beds—the men and women of the world are murmuring something ugly to each other.

Right now, they are tickling each other’s minds, with quiet whispers of the change that is coming, that is happening right now… here, there, and everywhere. They speak of it in dozens of different terms, tones and euphemisms, but they drive at the same wretched thing: mankind is about to be delivered a whole shitload of comeuppance.

The gin-soaked armchair quarterback with the bad hair weave knows that his people are screwed. The greasy-eyed politician realizes the same. No different with the Holocaust-skinny housewife and the bratty teenager texting silly bullshit on a cell phone. The dogs even know that the world we know is about to get pear-shaped, busted, deformed, and twisted until it snaps. This supposedly noble thing we call society—this thing we call sanctity, this thing we call sanity—is spinning around the drain, ready to descend into the pipes of Hell.

The end is delivered by chance. Or delivered by God. Whichever school of thought you subscribe to, it’s all the same damn end game. You know that already, don’t you? Bet your ass you do.

It’s not delivered by bomb, bullet, plague, or monsters crawling from the depths of the sea.

Not by hatred, passion, fear, or maligned decisions.

Not by meteors or meat-eaters. Not by anything that we can touch with our hands or hearts.

Yes sir, it’s coming hard and fast.

They’re talking about this on the street corner right outside your filthy window, saying things like, “Can you believe this snow? Weather forecast says it might last three more days. I find that hard to swallow.” But deep down inside, they are swallowing it just about as hard as they can. They know what we’ve all known; in our genes, in our cells, since the day we were born. They know that there is a time to die for each and every person, and the laws of statistics dictate that eventually, ( one of these days, Alice, one of these days ) we are all destined to perish at the same time, by the same fate.

Somewhere out there… a daughter is asking her father why she can’t see out the first floor windows anymore. He pretends not to hear her, as he churns through answers that don’t come so easily to his bluish lips. Dr. Spock never wrote a manual on preparing your children for the apocalypse. And there it is . There’s that word that this doomed girl’s father has been avoiding. The apocalypse . The mere proclamation of the word brings a rifling terror to one’s gut. This hypothetical father says to his child, “It’ll melt, darling. The snow always melts. Always has. We’re just getting a lot of it this year.”

Somewhere out there… nestled away in a snowed-in weather station, they are mumbling the unfathomable precipitation accumulations over and over again, unwilling to accept the maddening temperatures that are being recorded on an hourly basis. It is the middle of March outside of Pittsburgh, when it should be thawing, or at least beginning to thaw. Twenty below in the middle of the afternoon. Forty below at night. One fellow notes that these are Siberian temperatures, not Pennsylvanian temperatures. They all laugh nervously, surveying their numbers over and over again, as if their eyeballs will suddenly make the numbers change to something more reasonable.

“I heard it’s snowing in the Bahamas. The fuckin’ Bahamas,” might be heard if you listen close enough to the mumbling citizens that live in your neighborhood. Somebody will call them out as a bullshitter, but something inside of you says that they are right, and that it is most definitely snowing in the Bahamas. You might picture a frightened monkey, hoarding away coconuts, screeching wildly at the strange substance coming from the sky, wondering inside of its primitive brain if it is indeed The End.

The internet is still functional at this point. God bless the internet, but its days are numbered. Phone lines are starting to fail, as are fiber and cable connections from one side of the planet to the other. Soon enough, television and the internet will go the way of the dodo, not without a rapid normalization in temperature and conditions.

The number one search phrase on the biggest search engines is “ Ice Age,” followed directly by “ Brad Pitt” and “ The End Of The World.” Other popular searches: “ Arctic Survival”, “ Will I Go To Heaven”, “ Keeping Warm”, and “ Eating The Dead.” The world has obviously watched too many dang movies. A commentator on CNN refers to the current state of panic among these disillusioned masses as, “ A whole lot of Hestons, not enough Omega Men .”

The frantic people of Earth speak of something indescribable changing, of something that has been right under their noses all along. They can’t give it a proper label. Even “Ice Age” and “Apocalypse” seem to fall short of what is really transpiring. This fate is not deserved, though many will think it is (for sin, for stupidity, for wastefulness). It is not predicted, or even predictable for that matter.

It’s that trailing speck of dust at the corner of your eye, always in the room though you can never look directly at it. You know it’s there, taunting you, sticking out the tongue and thumbing the nose. It wants to drive you mad, but it is just sneaky enough never to be known.

The earth is covering with snow and ice.

Deeper and deeper, so mankind sinks.

The snow warms enough to turn to ice, and then another arctic blast lands on top of that, and then another, and another, and another, ad infinitum. The electric lines cannot handle the burden, and soon, the phone lines will snap as well, if they haven’t already. Listen close, stand by your window, and you’ll hear them snapping like God’s guitar strings. Snappity-snap-snap-snap. Go forward, brave human, and create fire for the second time, because you’re going to need it.

Shit happens, as a wise man once said. Shit happens, and sometimes it happens over and over again, for days, weeks, months and years, until the eye of the beholder can no longer blink, for all the feces that is trapped beneath the eyelid.

Cue the Bing Crosby.

Well, the weather outside is frightful…

A chill ran through her body, all the way from her numbing toes to her face. She could no longer remember what it felt like to be naked, having worn so many layers of Gortex and wool these past weeks. She dreamed of the day she could take a warm shower, or sip on a cup of scalding tea. Everything was frigid, sinking deep into every surface, so deep that no amount of sun could ever thaw it out. The best she could do was bundle tight and think of her sweet boy.

“We’re leaving tomorrow morning,” she said.

“The hell you are,” her husband replied, grinding his teeth into the phone’s receiver, as he was known to do when confronted with stress.

Here we go , thought Annie, releasing a prolonged breath that had been forming deep inside of her chest. She almost didn’t call him at all, but that would have been unfair. It wasn’t written in the cards that she would make it home safe, so she owed it to him.

No. She owed it to her sweetie pie, Paulie .

The thought of never seeing him again ripped into her quaking guts, but that was unforgivable weakness. This, here and now, staring out the window at the devastation wrought by a pissed off Mother Nature, was a moment of strength. It had to be, if Annie was going to survive this atrocity. The thickening ice on the window obfuscated her view into what was once the company parking lot, where people hustled and bustled to start and end their days. She couldn’t see any of the abandoned vehicles anymore, even if she could have seen out the window clearly. She hadn’t seen the roofs of the cars in more than a week.