THE RELIGION OF BIG WEATHER

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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.