Saturday, the temperature hovered around 30 degrees. There was three feet of powder on the ground. It was the beginning of a three-day weekend. Perfect for skiing!

The Whitetail Ski Resort is just 90 minutes from D.C. and had received good reviews from colleagues. “In the history of Whitetail Resort, the skiing, snowboarding and snow tubing conditions have never been better. We have received over 4 feet of snow in the past week,” its web site gushed. So we headed to Whitetail, just outside of Clear Spring, Pa., and arrived about noon Saturday.

Too bad thousands of other skiers had the same idea. There were only a few parking spaces left, and a sign at the registration window warned there were no rental skis left in sizes 150 or 160 cm. But we found one pair of skis to rent, and the three of us hit the slopes. The conditions were great, the view from the top was lovely, and despite the multitudes on the hills, it wasn’t until late in the day that the intermediate slopes developed icy patches. It wasn’t a big resort, however, and it was pretty much at maximum capacity — and then some. The lift to the easy slopes, even though it was a quad and the workers made sure each chair had four people on it, moved agonizingly slowly…

Whitetail was having its own Big Olympic Games, complete with a giant elevated copper torch at the bottom of the main lifts. The BOG race announcer noted that as it was 50 degrees in Vancouver, we had much better conditions than the Olympians. At home that evening, as we watched the women plowing through slush in the Olympics freestyle mogul competition, we had to agree.

I failed to bring my camera, but other skiers/sliders have posted on Flickr, like these.

The view from Connecticut Avenue and L Sts, NW, early this afternoon

I did make it out of Baltimore, precisely on time, Monday morning, even though BWI had only one runway open. I arrived in Detroit at noon, 24 hours before the first significant snow of the year in southeast Michigan. Metro Detroit received 8 to 10 inches of snow overnight, so lots of schools got their first snow day. Here are some things that happened in the ensuing anarchy:

• Grocery stores remained stocked with foodstuffs ranging from apple juice to zucchini
• Wayne County had 100 snowplows salting and plowing the roads, so that all main highways and roads were dry by midday
• City buses kept running (at least to the extent that they usually run)
• The People Mover light rail system kept running. Well, it didn’t really have far to go, and it doesn’t really move that many people, but nevertheless …

Alas, my Wednesday afternoon flight to Baltimore was canceled, so I had to buy more clothes and toothpaste.

In the meantime, this just in from a desperate shopper in the mean streets of the District: “It’s grim here. Safeway is shut down. Sign on door says no milk. Police tape around entrance. Roads impassable. Garbage piling up along street…”

Pedestrian traffic only

The 17.4 inches of snowfall recorded at Reagan National Airport yesterday is was the fourth biggest snowstorm in DC’s history of officially recorded storms, the Washington Post says. That doesn’t count the 36 inches of snow the area received in 1722, recorded in the diaries of both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Of course, the District of Columbia wasn’t a district or the nation’s capital then, nor did the nation itself even exist. But our Founding Fathers were faithfully chronicling the Virginia weather with quill pens and sheepskin.

The worst officially recorded snowstorm was the 1922 Knickerbocker Storm, so named because it caused the collapse of the flat-roofed Knickerbocker Theater in Washington, killing 98 people.

From here in Capitol Hill, where the power lines are fortunately underground so that we still have power and heat, the 2010 Snowmageddon has been fun. Yesterday we ventured out on foot at midday. The streets had been plowed, somewhat, probably for the benefit of the firetrucks down the street. Everyone was walking in the street, even on Pennsylvania Avenue, as the sidewalks were impassable. An SUV would pass by only occasionally. Kids were sledding at the Capitol, and a lot of photographers were out. The Harris Teeter grocery store near Potomac Avenue was open, bless them. We didn’t make it to Dupont, but some 2,000 people celebrated there with a giant snowball fight.

The sunny weather today seems to have brought everyone out, digging out their cars and shoveling their sidewalks. We walked to Eastern Market, which was closed for the second day. It was a gorgeous day, perfect for skiing, if only you could get to a hill. It took Joe more than an hour to dig out our little car from the driveway, while I wisely opted to upload photos.

Tomorrow morning I’m scheduled to fly to Detroit, but BWI has cleared only one of its two runways as of this afternoon, so we shall see. The federal government is closed, so that should slow things down considerably. Besides that, more snow is possible Tuesday and Wednesday. Meanwhile, I hear Detroit is snow-deprived…

More of my photos on Flickr

The DC/MD/VA Snowpocalypse Flickr pool

It’s supposed to snow 16 to 24 inches Friday and Saturday, which would be the first time since 1986 that DC has received two snowstorms of 10 inches or more in a winter. (We got 16 inches on Dec. 19, which seem to have been enjoyed by everyone, as it brought Christmas vacation early. Except perhaps for that cop who pulled a gun in a snowball fight.)

And even though the first snowflake has yet to fall, and even though the 6 inches of snow we were supposed to get Wednesday turned into only 2 inches, yet schools were still canceled outside the district, PANIC is gripping the city. Our local Safeway was more insane than usual tonight, with people buying jugs of water and cases of beer. Tomorrow’s business meetings are being canceled, and federal government workers are on unscheduled leave, meaning, I guess, that they can have the day off if they can’t make it in. Channel 9 is teaching people how to shovel snow (You have to get under the snow with the shovel, apparently.)

The National Weather Service says, “A WINTER STORM WARNING MEANS SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF SNOW… SLEET…AND ICE ARE EXPECTED OR OCCURRING. STRONG WINDS ARE ALSO POSSIBLE. THIS WILL MAKE TRAVEL VERY HAZARDOUS OR NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE FRIDAY NIGHT.”

All right, we have our boots and coats, though we left the snow shovel in Michigan. We can walk to the grocery store. We have enough alcohol to last the weekend, or at least 48 hours. Good luck to all of you!

Fountain at the McNamara Terminal at DTW

Chances are you’ve seen Fuller’s work, in fountains where jets of water appear solid and ropelike. The secret is creating zero-turbulence water streams, called laminars. Some of their most popular fountains are at the Bellagio casino (see YouTube videos) in Las Vegas, which dance to music, and the leaping streams at EPCOT (one of Fuller’s early works, as a Disney Imagineer).

In Michigan, you can see work by WET at the McNamara Terminal at Detroit Metro Airport (see Youtube videos), at Campus Martius and the Compuware headquarters in downtown Detroit, and at the Somerset Collection (don’t call it a mall!) in Troy. I can attest that the fountain at DTW is a calming presence conveniently located near a Starbucks stand, a nice place to stop for a few moments and watch the travelers rushing by. In Washington, WET Design created the fountain at the International Monetary Fund Headquarters, installed in 2005.

WET Design has a highly experiential web site, with photos and videos of their creations. Click on Creations, then navigate either through the map or the timeline. Take a look at the huge Dubai fountains, completed in April 2009, and the Revson Fountain at the Lincoln Center, subject of the New Yorker piece.

The Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress

By Joseph B. White

Here’s a mind-expanding way to spend a few free hours in Washington. Go to the Library of Congress, pay homage to the Gutenberg Bible on display not far from the main entrance and visit the replica of Thomas Jefferson’s library on the second floor. Then, go see the real Library.

To get there, take the elevator at the back of the first floor entry hall to the C (cellar) level, and enter the underground tunnels that connect the LOC’s main buildings. Follow the signs for reader registration. Essentially, you are getting a library card for the biggest library in the country.

It’s easy. You show a photo ID, enter some personal data in the computer system, and soon you have a freshly minted photo ID, a bar-coded pass to the collections, good for two years. On the way back to the Jefferson building, stop at the underground cafeteria on the way back for a cup of coffee (not great) and a chunk of red velvet cake (ok, not great, either).

After my coffee break, I took my new all-access pass to the American Folklife Center reading room, back in the Jefferson building room LJ G53. This is the home of the amazing collection of blues and folk music collected by Alan Lomax during a 70-year career.

The Folklife Center librarians are friendly, and apparently quite used to dealing with blues geeks who wander in babbling about Lomax. That’s what I did, and before I knew it, I had been presented with a copy of Lomax’s book about his travels recording blues musicians in the Jim Crow era South, “The Land Where the Blues Began.” Also pressed into my hands was a computer printout listing some of Lomax’s recordings from a 1942 trip through the Mississippi Delta during which he recorded, among others, Son House and a young singer listed as “MacKinley Morganfield.” That’s Muddy Waters to you.

I asked to listen to some Son House and recordings of a gospel group called the Friendly Five Harmony Singers. (Muddy Waters seemed too obvious.)

One of the librarians rolled over to my chair an ancient, reel-to-reel tape recorder, roughly the size of a suitcase and mounted to a rolling stand. It had a sticker identifying it as the property of National Public Radio – I assume NPR donated this antique to the Library for the purpose of allowing people like me to listen to these classic Lomax field recording in a vintage way. Because that’s what you get – a scuffed cardboard box that contains a reel-to-reel tape. Not a CD. Not a cassette.

The librarian threaded the tape, handed me the headphones and Presto! My head’s in a hotel room in Mississippi in July 1942 where Son House is explaining to Lomax how he tunes his guitar. (I think he called it, “A down low.” I couldn’t follow it without guitar in hand, but if I had one, I would have had all the notes, played two or three times by Mr. House.)

I listened to two reels worth of Son House – “American Defense Blues,” about the virtues of the World War II military buildup, and more familiar songs like the “Death Letter Blues,” listed in the catalogue as “Walking Blues.” I listened to The Friendly Five Harmony Singers sing old, old school gospel. A final tape had a long monologue identified only as “Talking to colored fellow about Jefferson Davis.” But it was time to go.

This was just one sliver of the Lomax collection, which is in turn just a fraction of all the folk music collected in this section of the library.

The one downside: Even with the fancy library card, you can’t take the tapes out of the building. Of course, even if you did, who’s got a reel-to-reel?

We visited the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden yesterday afternoon. It’s the circular — actually, cylindrical — building on the Mall. Part of the Smithsonian Institution, it features a large collection of modern and abstract paintings and sculptures. It opened to the public in 1969 with the donated collection of financier Joseph H. Hirshhorn. He kept collecting, however, and upon his death in 1981, his bequest nearly doubled the size of the museum’s collection.

The architecture is striking and the art is interesting. Some of it seems kind of ’60s-ish and trite, now. For example, you can find several sculptures made of recycled car parts that would look at home at the Ann Arbor Art Fairs with water spouting out of them. Also, they often have silly titles (”Are Years What? For Marianne Moore” by Mark di Suvero, for a giant red painted steel structure with another piece of steel hanging from a cable), as if the artist disdains the idea of explaining something about his/her work.

So: Today’s activity is match the sculptures in the photos below with their titles, listed below the photos. The first person to answer them all correctly will win a high-priced coffee drink. (Leave your correct email address so I can contact you.) If you can’t see the whole sculpture in the thumbnail below, click on it to see the full image.

The sculptures

The titles
A. King and Queen
B. Monument to Balzac
C. Two-Piece Reclining Figure: Points
D. Last Conversation Piece
E. Song of the Little Frog
F. Untitled
G. Boccioni’s Fist – Lines of Force II
H. Post-Balzac
I. Column Of Peace
J. Monsoon Drift
K. Voltri XV
L. Seated Woman on a Bench