Why I Hate “Wintry Mix”
On “Wintry Mix”
Like the word “pulchritude,” which means “beauty” but sounds revolting, the phrase “wintry mix” is unforgivably dishonest. It sounds like something you would bring to a holiday party: toasted hazelnuts, dried cranberries, dark chocolate, tied up in a cellophane bag with maroon and gold ribbons. It sounds like something you would drink at that party: brandy, bitters, sweet vermouth. It sounds like something the host would have on in the background: Bing Crosby, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” Coltrane covering “My Favorite Things.” It sounds like sleigh bells at dusk. It sounds like snowflakes drifting from darkness into the light of a streetlamp when the blizzard is just getting started and the hush of rightness has fallen over the world. It sounds wonderful. Too bad. It is a cold, wet, sharp, splashy, slush-creating, hypothermia-inducing abomination, a wrongness falling over the world. A better name for it would be “airborne depravity.” A better name for it would be “meteorological pox.” A better name for it would be “pulchritude.”To this nomenclatural offense, we must add definitional, taxonomic, and even ontological transgressions as well. For starters, in spite of how it feels when you are walking through it to get to the F train, wintry mix might not even exist. METAR, a condensed weather-reporting format that is used by aviators and meteorologists, has no code for it; the closest term is RASN, short for “rain and snow.” (“RASN” would also be a better name for wintry mix. It’s got a kind of built-in snarl: “ ‘How’s the weather?’ ‘Ugh, it’s RASNing.’ ”) The American Meteorological Society’s “Glossary of Meteorology” skips straight from “winterization” to “wire-weight gauge” (a device used to measure the height of a river). When I asked Kenneth Heideman, the society’s director of publications, about this omission, he responded with a grim pronouncement: “I would guess that most people can figure out what it means.” Urban Dictionary, not known for omitting things, defines “wintry mix” as “a gross messy mix of snow and rain.” And adds: “is generally considered a ‘bummer.’ ”As King Derwin of Didd observes, in Dr. Seuss’s “Bartholomew and the Oobleck” (“oobleck” would also be a better name for wintry mix), there are, meteorologically speaking, a limited number of things that can fall out of the sky. In fact, in North America, at first there is only one: here, as everywhere outside of the tropics, almost all precipitation starts as snow. When the skies finally open up after one of those swampy, ominous, ninety-eight-degree August days, the deluge that ensues is the melted remains of a snowstorm taking place several miles overhead. Like humans according to John Locke, that weather starts out as pure as the driven et cetera and gradually changes.Thus: rain comes from snow that melts as it falls through lower, warmer layers of atmosphere. Sleet starts out as snow, melts into rain, then freezes back into nasty little pellets as it passes through a cold layer of air near the ground. (At least, that is what we mean by “sleet” in the United States. In Great Britain, where chips are fries and a mac is a raincoat—the topmost of the six or seven layers of clothing that you’ll need under the circumstances—“sleet” usually means “wintry mix.”) Freezing rain also starts as snow and melts on the way down, but the lower layers of air aren’t cold enough to congeal it again, so it turns to ice only when it hits the ground. Then there’s the phenomenon known as freezing drizzle—not just freezing-rain lite but water droplets that stay liquid below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit because they haven’t encountered any of the small particles (such as dust or spores) that can catalyze the freezing process. These supercooled water droplets freeze the instant they touch anything: pavement, fence posts, the hood of your car, berries on bushes and twigs on trees. Those strange days when it feels like it’s raining but all the world is ghostly white are brought to you by freezing drizzle. When freezing drizzle encounters snowflakes, it turns into a type of soft hail known as graupel. “Graupel,” which almost but not quite rhymes with “awful,” would also be a better name for wintry mix.Wintry mix is a mix, wintry, of any of the above forms of precipitation, but—and here again the phrase is deceptive—they are not necessarily mixed together in the way of mixed drinks or mixed nuts or mixed media. It is possible for two or more things to fall from the sky at once: larger snowflakes preserve their form, smaller ones melt into rain, some of that rain freezes near the ground, and there you are, making your way to work through rain and sleet and snow like a heroic mail carrier. For the most part, though, wintry mix refers not to different stuff falling all at once in the same place but to different stuff falling in different but proximate places at around the same time. That micro-variability in weather is difficult for meteorologists to forecast, and so, for the most part, they do not. Instead, they use “wintry mix” as a sort of ass-covering anti-prediction. “It’s extremely hard to say with precision that, at 2:13 P.M., we will change from snow to rain or vice versa,” Robert Henson, a meteorologist with Weather Underground, told me. “Wintry mix kind of covers the bases over the period of a few hours, or over a metropolitan area where it might be snowing on one side of town and raining on the other.”If it is snowing on one side of town and raining on the other, where is the town located? No, not in Hell, however hellish the cross-town commute may be. (If we grant, for a moment, that Hell exists, we must also grant that it is probably too hot there for wintry mix. Possibly the damned endure boiling drizzle.) The real answer is that the town is most likely in the central or eastern United States. For that you can blame a windry mix: cold air rushing down from Canada, warm air sweeping up from the Gulf of Mexico, stormy air pouring off the Rocky Mountains, western air arriving on the jet stream. Way up over our heads, these different currents, with their wildly varying temperatures and behaviors, get together and do to one another wet and untoward things. “There aren’t all that many places in the world that have such a conducive setting to produce completely variegated winter storms,” Henson said. “We’re a sweet spot.” Or something.Wintry mix is produced largely by conditions in the sky; accordingly, it is mostly agnostic about conditions on the ground. It falls on farmhouses in Vermont and corn silos in Nebraska and pretty little ponds in Virginia. But, like its animal-kingdom analogues, cockroaches and rats, wintry mix showed up in the big city, looked around, and saw that it had found its spiritual home. It is in cahoots with cabbies and dry cleaners. It has kin in the creepy precipitation that falls on subway platforms thirty feet underground. It cuts deals with blocked gutters, camouflages itself as asphalt, and soaks you up to your ankles when you step off the curb. It is as mongrel, fallen, and dirty as we city dwellers ourselves have long been reputed to be.For the most part, I like things that are blended and variegated and defy categorization—though for the most part such things do not ruin my shoes. Still, I might need to reverse my ruling on the thoroughgoing dishonesty of wintry mix. We admire the snowflake as elegant and immaculate; we admire the snow for its capacity, overnight or in an hour, to transform the world. By contrast, wintry mix—not in the unpleasant experience of it, but in its essence—must be admitted to look a lot like the world as it really is: motley, changeable, endangering us by exposure, impossible to predict, the astonishingly beautiful stuff mingling with the stuff generally considered a bummer, all of it melting away soon enough into something else.