An Icy End to Time
L. Penseur
July 1, 1999
The world did not end on January 1, 2000, nor did America's obsession with the end times. Those with faith, and those "of no faith," will continue searching for life's ultimate closure. Perhaps the closest I've come was by Lake Michigan's shore. "Some say the world will end with fire," wrote a great and agonized New England poet, "others say with ice." You would think that a resident of the Athens of America would know something about ice. But I had to go to Chicago to see what a world ending in ice might be like.
While 1,100 of my closest friends and I attended a conference last year in Chicago, held in the Chicago Hilton and Towers overlooking Lake Michigan, we experienced a little snowfall. Actually, it was the blizzard of a New Englander's nightmares, the kind you talk about around the wood stove in Vermont country stores for decades to come. I had heard of Midwestern blizzards from my mother, who went to school in Chicago, but these stories I regarded as legends from the distant past that should be treated with some skepticism. I began to become a true believer when I woke up one morning to find the snow traveling horizontally past my fourteenth floor window, with about twelve feet of visibility—though I'm probably overestimating. That was cool, but even better was the tiny, thread-like stream of snow that was sifting through the multiple panes of glass and barriers of weather stripping to slowly accumulate in the corner of the windowsill.
It went on like that all day, though I and all the other conference attendees, safe in the climate-controlled Hilton's womb, really had no idea what it was like outside. We would occasionally meet people on the elevators who were, quite literally, snow-encrusted, who looked as ...
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