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Last day, 14 inches of unusual summer snow fell on the Cameron Fire, Colorado, showing how much can change in a year.
During the first week of September 2019, my wife and I attended an outdoor music festival in a forest outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico. At the time it seemed like a crazy experience because it was raining one night and some things got a bit muddy. A Prius can even get stuck for a moment. Pretty wild, isn't it?
Maybe wild for 2019. This year there are brand new types of indeed wild. Like everyone else, I spend every day grappling with a pandemic, a shattered economy, and whatever could be called politics in 2020. But on a routine Tuesday in 2020, everything hit me in a new way.
Above the valley in which I have been living in northern New Mexico for a few days, there was a billow of smoke that obscured the view of the nearby mountains and cast a brown hue over the horizon. Fires in the western United States produced such thick smoke Satellites had a hard time distinguishing the sharp feathers from normal clouds.
Gusty winds whipped sand and debris from our drought-laden high desert environment, making it difficult to tell where the smoky haze ended and the dust storm began. The two seemed to band together in some sort of apocalyptic atmospheric hookah that was struck from hell.
Tumbleweeds flew across the street and hit windshields. When driving home on Tuesday, I had to dodge to avoid a piece of corrugated iron roofing that had been blown off a shed as it danced across my lane.
This is the formidable desensitizing power of 2020. So it is to live through history.
Stranger still, there is hope that the insane late summer snowstorm that broke in these fierce winds will extinguish the Cameron Fire and other ongoing western forest fires.
Officials in Colorado say the snow stopped the fire from progressing for the time being, but the fire is still smoldering beneath the powder, so the battle between the forces of nature continues.
This is only the 15th time in the last 12 decades that a weather station in the US has temperatures above 32 degrees Celsius one day, followed by snow the next, according to climatologist Brian Brettschneider.
There are 14 cases in which a "large" climate station hits 90 ° F on one calendar day and has measurable snow the next (since 1900). Denver exceeded 90 ° F today and is expected to have snow tomorrow. #cowx pic.twitter.com/nK7wfc7EY8
- Brian Brettschneider (@ Climatologist49) September 7, 2020
But somehow that seems almost less crazy than the rather mundane encounter with a mud puddle a year ago.
This is the formidable desensitizing power of 2020. So it is to live through history. At some point life will return to a state of such mundane comfort that pushing a vehicle out of a mud makes for a vivid anecdote. In years' time we will tell younger people about life in 2020, and it will seem like a strange world to them - just as we might imagine it today in the USA or in wartime Europe.
But it seems we have at least a few months, if not a year or two, before previously bizarre and unusual events come back to justice. The best truism we can live by is the one we've all learned in the past few months: it can and probably will get stranger.
I'm so used to unprecedented curiosities that I assume dragons will appear in the sky at any moment. The real question is whether her looks would surprise someone living in 2020.
