Post-Juan-Induced Panic Disorder

You’d have thought the world was ending. Traffic was gridlocked for blocks. At the grocery store, the aisles were jammed with aggressive, monomaniacal shoppers, and the checkout lineups were backlogged into a huge interlocking mess of people and carts and crying babies.

Had war been declared? Was an alien invasion underway?

No. It was a Friday night and there was a bit of a snowstorm in the forecast for Saturday.

As it turned out, it was a pretty decent little snowstorm, but nothing really worth panicking over. Still, Halifax was in a state of chaos both before and after the storm.

I’m actually a big believer in being prepared. I’ve always got my little emergency lantern and battery-operated radio on standby, plus a few tins of beans and bottles of water stashed away in the basement. Still, I really don’t see why a simple snowstorm should throw everyone into such a frenzy of grocery stockpiling. I wouldn’t have even been at the store myself, but it happened to be my week to take my mother-in-law shopping for groceries.

So there we were, when we finally got through the traffic, helplessly getting bumped and jostled around the grocery store aisles. Some aisles were impassible, completely crammed with carts. Some shelves were bare, and I mean stripped, of whatever had been for sale there a little earlier. One woman who passed us rolled her eyes and said, “Some guy just ran right into me with his cart and then gave ME a dirty look!”

I had to work pretty hard to be Zen about it all. Close eyes. Breathe in. Open eyes, reach gently for chicken soup. Ignore woman who just knocked entire shelf of cans almost onto partner’s head. Exhale.

And I do have a theory about what was going on. I think we Haligonians have a pretty serious case of what I’m calling Post-Juan-Induced Panic Disorder, or PJIPD (pronounce it with me, “puh-jip’-DUH”). We pretty much all got caught with our safety-pants down (is there such a thing as safety-pants?) when Hurricane Juan hit, and again, when White Juan left us buried under what appeared to be the beginning of a new ice age.

We vowed to never again be stuck in a state of emergency without at least a week’s supply of food, water, and Captain Morgan. So with every new forecast of snow or high winds, we all rush out to stock up, just in case we get hung out to dry, once again, by the power company or the plow.

Sure, it’s an over-reaction to an ordinary winter forecast. But on this particular weekend, as if to prove me wrong, most of Halifax did end up stuck indoors for the better part of the next day, because the folks who manage the city’s snow-clearing crews were so utterly unprepared for a snowfall in November. As they scrambled to get plows on the road, they managed to demonstrate, once again, that a tiny bit of weather DOES equal a near-state of emergency in Halifax, thereby justifying and reinforcing the need for a good, pre-storm panic.

If this is what it’s gonna be like every time we get a storm this winter, I may have to do some stockpiling myself. Fill the cupboard with nuts and berries and go into hibernation. Somebody wake me up when the last snow is melting, so I can start freaking out about whether I’ve got enough sunscreen to make it through the summer.