Brooks: Minnesota looks like Minnesota again

The calendar says we’re about to spring forward. The overnight storm says it’s never too late for a snow day.

On Tuesday, our yards were bare and brown and blah. By morning, central and southern Minnesota were swaddled in snow. The Ash Wednesday storm was impressive enough to give Halloween ‘91 a run for its anecdotes.

It’s pretty. It’s plowable. It’s packable. It’s all going to melt. It’s the perfect storm.

Half a foot or more of heavy, soggy snow closed schools and stalled city buses in the middle of morning rush hour. After a winter with more extreme cold than extreme snow, Minnesota looked like Minnesota again.

While some of us made the most of an unexpected snow day, others were just trying to make it through the snow.

Isaac Kaufman landed at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport in the middle of the night, in the middle of the storm, after a few days in Vegas at a getaway with friends.

A taxi driver gamely navigated the high winds and driving snow, inching closer and closer to Kaufman’s home in Edina. They almost made it.

“Once we had turned off of France Avenue and onto some of the residential streets, the taxi driver basically looked at the unplowed roads and said, ‘I’m going to get stuck. I can’t do this,” Kaufman said. “So I got out of the taxi and walked.”

It was 1:30 in the morning and he was at least half a mile from home; dressed for Vegas weather in a light sweatshirt and no coat.

“I wound up traipsing through the snow for a while,” he said, with magnificent Minnesota understatement. “It wasn’t killer-cold last night, but I had to keep moving.”

He has no hard feelings toward the driver.

“It was an adventure,” Kaufman said. “I don’t hold a grudge against him or anything. He’s got to make a living, and if he [got] stuck out there, who knows how long it would have taken to dig him out. Sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.”

Minnesota weather can turn on a dime. Some of Kaufman’s friends caught an earlier flight home from Vegas and landed ahead of the first flakes of snow. Kaufman’s flight was delayed by just a few hours — enough to turn a short commute into eternal Minnesota bragging rights.

We saw this storm coming. Without the National Weather Service, without the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, without the hundreds of meteorologists the Trump administration fired last week — we might not.

In 1888, children in Minnesota and across the Great Plains walked to school on an unusually warm January day. Many of them froze to death trying to walk home through the white-out blizzard that struck hours later, killing hundreds.

On Armistice Day 1940, Minnesota duck hunters — including a very young Bud Grant — headed out on a day that started with temperatures in the 60s and ended in a raging blizzard that killed more than 150 people across the region, including many hunters who had been caught unaware.

If you saw this snow day coming and stocked up on groceries, then, over the rim of a mug of cocoa, watched the snow fall, give a government meteorologist your thanks. And maybe a heartfelt apology for what we’re allowing DOGE to do to them.