Severity of blizzards increases over time...

By Jim Heffernan

As this is being written (midday Feb. 29), the Duluth area is being hit by a massive blizzard with near-hurricane-force winds, heavy snowfall, drifting and disruptions to civil society – nearly everything is closed down. Of course you knew that if you live anywhere near the Head of the Lakes.

And as this is being written, I am sitting in a high-rise condo overlooking a wide sandy beach on the Gulf of Mexico as it laps the shore of Florida. It could be sunnier, but the temperature is in the low 70s.

I’d rather be in Duluth.

Call me crazy, but I enjoy the excitement of blizzards. The hunkering down, the challenge of moving about the city. If it’s not impossible to plow through the drifts and deep snow or to see out the windshield due to whiteouts, I like to slip my SUV into all-wheel drive and ride around in major snowstorms.

That’s how crazy I am.

So enjoy, those of you who might read this before it ends, and be grateful after it is over that you survived what certainly will be remembered as The Great Leap Year Blizzard of 2012.

All of that said, I hasten to remind that, while I am some 1,300 miles due south of Duluth, I pretty-much know as much about what is going on there -- snowfall rates, wind speeds, school closings, highway closings, bus service cut back -- as Duluthians do, thanks to the Internet.

Call it the information age.

But sometimes I look back nostalgically on earlier times in my life when the Weather Service (it was a Bureau then) did not see these storms coming from a thousand miles away and give warnings days in advance of their impending, then imminent, arrival. No weather satellites, no Doppler radar, no Internet to spread the word. We had radio, but it only kicked in after the snowstorm had begun.

One of the joys of blizzards in those days was that they could surprise you. I can recall going to a movie on an ordinary winter night and walking out two hours later into a raging snowstorm I had no idea was coming, placing in doubt my ability to make it home that night (I always did).

One time as a child I was Christmas shopping downtown with my mother at the old Big Duluth clothing store. When we walked in, things were normal. When we came out, the evergreen holiday decorations strung over Superior Street in those days were wildly swinging, blinding snow obscured visibility and we hastily caught a bus home. Walking up hill from the bus stop to our house, all was quiet, except for the wind. No traffic. We walked up the middle of the street in ruts vehicles made before the hillside street became impassible to uphill traffic.

I think the dearth of warning and the excitement of suddenly being on the receiving end of a major snowstorm in those days is responsible for all those stories told by the older generation starting out, “This storm is nothing. Why, when I was a boy…” It could be a girl.

Some people will remember this Leap Year storm for the rest of their lives. And it likely will get more severe as the years go by.

Like the night as a child when I was Christmas shopping with my mother and… Well, there it is.

Enjoy today, you Northland denizens. And remember it in the future. Don’t forget to make it better. I’ll be back mid-March so there’s hope we’ll get another before spring ruins everything.

If you want to see a great video of the blizzard taken earlier today, click HERE to view John Meyers' Duluth News Tribune story.

Me and Dmitri and Vladimir and Luciano

By Jim Heffernan

I frequently think in terms of degrees of separation between people. The reigning theory is that everyone is about six steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person on Earth -- the famous “six degrees of separation.” Within the United States only about four people stand between you and, say, George Clooney.

Clooney is a good example in the Duluth-Superior area. He visited Duluth a couple of years ago promoting a movie, so quite a few people in our midst met him. The chances are you know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who met Clooney. That’s four degrees of separation. It might be less for some.

But enough introduction. Now for the meat. Dmitri Nabokov died recently in Switzerland at age 77. He was the son of the famous writer Vladimir Nabokov, author of “Lolita,” on every list of the greatest novels of the 20^th century. When you read it you know why.

How many degrees of separation lie between you and Dmitri Nabokov? And why should you care? If you have met me, only one person – yours truly -- lies between you and Dmitri. I, having met Dmitri, have only him to count between me and Vladmir.

That was very much on my mind 35 years ago or so – it was in the mid ‘70s – when Dmitri Nabokov showed up in my office at the Duluth News Tribune where, at the time, I was in charge of arts and entertainment coverage.

Aside from being the son of Vladimir Nabokov, Dmitri was a classical singer, appearing in operas and oratorios in Europe and America. He was in Duluth to perform with the Duluth-Superior Symphony in one of its big choral presentations; I can’t recall which one. Symphony management wanted to drum up ticket sales, so they sent their not-so-famous bass soloist to the newspaper for an interview.

I recall almost nothing about what we talked about, but I do remember sitting across from him and thinking how amazing it was to be chatting with the son of Vladmir Nabokov, one of the greatest writers in English after an earlier career as a writer in Russia, where he was born.

Dmitri was quite tall and thin, in contrast to the images of his portly father in photographs. I recall, too, that he sang reasonably well, but nothing special. He was a well-trained singer who could hold his own on any classical stage without setting the world on fire.

So, I met him, and if you’ve met me, then… Well, you know the degrees of separation.

In its obituary for Dmitri last week, the New York Times (byline: Daniel S. Slotnik–read here) opened another degrees-of-separation door to me. It said as a young singer, Dmitri made his operatic debut in “La Boheme” in Italy with Luciano Pavarotti early in Pavarotti’s career.

Well now, let’s count those degrees of separation: You, me, Dmitri Nabakov, Luciano Pavarotti. Three for you, two for me.

With just two degrees of separation between me and both Vladmir Nabakov and Luciano Pavarotti, I can say I’ve gotten pretty close to one of the greatest writers of the 20^th Century and one of the greatest tenors.

How can I miss?