It came as expected, with all the usual omens. The driving wind out of the east picked up right on schedule with a chill that ran under the skin and deep into the bones and finally forcing its way into the subconscious. This wasn’t an ordinary storm. It was the first big storm of the winter season. We spent six months unpreparing for this.

The great counter-clockwise swirl over the continent centered us at midnight. The meteorologists called it a “Low Pressure System”, and to them it was all moving as they predicted. To those of us underneath it, time stopped. It was time to hunker down inside and wait for it to pass.

The storm brought us five inches of snow, thirteen centimeters, just as predicted. Rarely does a storm run as perfectly as scheduled in the middle of a big continent. After the clenching cold was done unloading, there was nothing but silence. The snow absorbed every sound, every thought, every notion that this was anything but the cold and still way things should be.

Gradually, the stillness was cut by growling and scraping, the sounds of everyone digging out with blowers and plows and all the implements that had been safely tucked away in garages and drained of their oil until this moment. This was not a big deal after all. This is Minnesota. We were prepared.

I had the great joy of experiencing a similar sized snowfall once in Greenville, South Carolina. It proceeded in all the same ways, except for one: while the weatherpeople saw it coming, the populace was completely unprepared. I waited in a Ramada for two days for it to melt, because there was nothing else that could be done. Two days of reading, card games, and a time stopping silence. What else could there be? The fancy radar and satellite images weren’t all that useful when what we really needed were some plows.

Disasters are often like this. Most of them don’t start out as disasters, but simply a lack of planning. Once a problem is defined, the equipment probably exists somewhere to at least ease the pain, perhaps even take care of the situation. Sometimes nature throws something bigger at our tiny plans, such as Hurricane Katrina, and there’s only so much we can do about it. Usually, however, we have all the tools at our disposal to at least make things a bit easier. It’s a matter of planning, which is to say a matter of will. A matter of denial that it’s even possible.

This isn’t all about weather. Sometimes, the storms are made by the people who are supposed to be running things with the clockwork precision of a low pressure system winding across the continent. It doesn’t take much of a look at the current financial state of the USofA to realize that a lot of people in charge have made some rather big mistakes. This is more than the subprime lending problem, larger even than the foreclosure problem. The story here is that we have a budget deficit 6% of GDP and a balance of trade deficit about the same. The story is that we can predict the weather better even than we can make decisions about how to run our own nation. The story is that we aren’t paying attention. We put the silence before the storm, not afterward where it belongs.

The first snowstorm of the season really isn’t a big deal. It’s merely a matter of being ready for it, or at least not making the situation worse. The silence that follows shows the way to handle these things; a cold, still sense of bracing calm. That silence is when we have a chance to get a handle on the situation, and put our little plans into action. The silence is the time to act. Can we say that our leaders, public and private, are taking the action needed on the financial disaster of our own making?

Meanwhile, Saint Paul has declared a “Snow Emergency”. The plows will arrive any moment. The cars have all been moved off of the streets, and the air is heavy with the stillness of anticipation. It’s our first snow, but it’s just like all the other ones. We’re ready. It’s not a big deal at all.