THE RELIGION OF BIG WEATHER

By LANCE MORROW

ICICLES--SIX FEET LONG, AND AT THEIR TIPS, as bright and sharp as needles--hang from the eaves: wild ice stalactites, dragon's teeth. I peer through them to see the world transformed to abstract whiteout. Little dervish snow tornadoes twirl across the blank. The car is out there somewhere, represented by a subtle bump in the snowfield. The old Jeep truck, a larger beast, is up to its door handles, like a sinking remnant: dinosaur yielding to ice age. The town's behemoth snowplow passes on the road, dome light twirling, and casts aside a frozen doe that now lies, neck broken, upon the roadside snowbank, soon to vanish under the snowfall still to come.

There is a double-jointed consciousness at work in the dramatics of big weather. Down in the snowstorm, we are as mortal as the deer. I sink to my waist in a drift, I panic, my arms claw for an instant, like a drowning swimmer's, in the powder. Men up and down the storm collapse with coronaries, snow shovels in their hands, cheeks gone a deathly color, like frostbitten plums.

Yet when we go upstairs to consult the Weather Channel, we settle down, as cozy gods do, to hover high above the earth and watch the map with a divine perspective. Moist air labeled L for low rides up the continent from the Gulf of Mexico and collides with the high that has slid down from the North Pole. And thus is whipped up the egg-white fluff on the studio map that, down in the frozen, messy world, buries mortals.

An odd new metaphysics of weather: it is not that weather has necessarily grown more apocalyptic. The famous "Winter of the Blue Snow" of 1886-87 turned rivers of the American West into glaciers that when they thawed, carried along inundations of dead cattle. Theodore Roosevelt was virtually ruined as a rancher by the weather that destroyed 65% of his herd. In the annus mirabilis of 1811, the Mississippi River flowed northward briefly because of the New Madrid earthquake.

What's new is the theater of it. Television does not create weather, any more than it creates contemporary politics. However, the ritual ceremonies of televised weather have endowed a subject often previously banal with an amazing life as mass entertainment, nationwide interactive preoccupation and a kind of immense performance art.

What we have is weather as electronic American Shintoism, a casual but almost mystic daily religion wherein nature is not inert but restless, stirring, alive with kinetic fronts and meanings and turbulent expectations (forecasts, variables, prophecies). We have installed an elaborate priesthood and technology of interpretation: acolytes and satellites preside over snow and circuses. At least major snowstorms have about them an innocence and moral neutrality that is more refreshing than the last national television spectacle, the O.J. Simpson trial.

One attraction is the fact that these large gestures of nature are apolitical. The weather in its mirabilis mode can, of course, be dragged onto the op-ed page to start a macro-argument about global warming or a micro-spat over a mayor's fecklessness in deploying snowplows. Otherwise, traumas of weather do not admit of political interpretation. The snow Shinto reintroduces an element of what is almost charmingly uncontrollable in life. And, as shown last week, surprising, even as the priests predict it. This is welcome--a kind of ideological relief--in a rather stupidly politicized society living under the delusion that everything in life (and death) is arguable, political and therefore manipulable--from diet to DNA. None of the old earthbound Marxist Who-Whom here in meteorology, but rather sky gods that bang around at higher altitudes and leave the earth in its misery, to submit to the sloppy collateral damage.

The moral indifference of weather, even when destructive, is somehow stimulating. Why? The sheer leveling force is pleasing. It overrides routine and organizes people into a shared moment that will become a punctuating memory in their lives ("Lord, remember the blizzard in '96?").

Or perhaps one's reaction is no more complicated than a child's delight in dramatic disruption. Anyone loves to stand on the beach with a hurricane coming--a darkly lashing Byronism in surf and wind gets the blood up. The god's, or child's, part of the mind welcomes big weather--floods and blizzards. The coping, grown-up-human part curses it, and sinks.

The paradox of big weather: it makes people feel important even while it dramatizes their insignificance. In some ways, extreme weather is a brief moral equivalent of war--as stimulating as war can sometimes be, though without most of the carnage.

The sun rises upon diamond-scattered snowfields and glistens upon the lucent dragon's teeth. In the distance, three deer, roused from their shelter under pines, venture forth. They struggle and plunge undulously through the opulent white.

Upstairs, I switch on the Shinto Weather Channel and the priests at the map show me the next wave--white swirls and eddies over Indiana, heading ominously east.