Chapter 18: Spoilers (Nothing Bad Happens)
The dead speak! And by that, I obviously mean that from the dead of winter comes the voice of the angels in the form of white, flaky frozen water falling from the sky. As of this Notorious Notes, the Seattle Metro Area is seeing its first signs of snow for the 2019-2020 winter season. Panic has already begun to strike deep into the hearts of the locals. Nothing Bad Happens.
Discussions of disaster preparedness take prominence in water-cooler talk across the metropolis. Local grocery stores are running out of bottled water and canned goods in preparation for the inevitable “Snowmageddon” that has become a yearly tradition in the area. This author’s future weather forecast predicts a week’s worth of snowfall to occur in the coming days. However, by the time you, dear Notorious Notes reader, have laid your eyeballs upon my written words, the winter apocalypse will have presumably passed me and my fellow Seattleites by.
We will have come out the other side, older and wiser – changed.
Hence why I am typing out these words in Notorious Notes so far in advance. Who is to tell who I shall become on this blog’s release? Perhaps some sort of wild man, starved and crazed from the lack of sunlight? Or perhaps the leader of some sort of snow coalition, rising to power after the collapse of local government? Maybe the snow yetis of legend will have come down from their mountainous villages and struck down your beloved author in the prime of his youth? Or we’ll get a little bit of snow, locals will freak out about it, most government employees will get some days off, and we’ll all go back to living our lives as if nothing happened. Probably that last one, but who’s to say?
Though, and this is somewhat wrestling-related so bear with me, since I moved to this area (about two, maybe almost three years ago), WWE has been pretty consistent with coming to the pacific northwest in or around February. They’ll usually do some combination of Portland, OR and Seattle or Everett, WA. I have been called to do extra work multiple times during these winter trips; every single time, that has been the week of the legendary Snowmaggedon. Last year, they did RAW in Portland on Monday and Smackdown in Everett on Tuesday.
My crew and I rode down to Portland the Sunday before and stayed in a hotel to reduce the stress of having to drive down in the morning.
When we left that Sunday, it had just begun snowing in Seattle and by the time we reached Portland for dinner, we were hearing reports of major snowfall in Seattle and the city was shutting down. But what did we care? We were in Portland! I don’t remember what we did that night (if anything, it was a conga line) but by the time RAW was over, the snow had caught up to us and the drive home was treacherous to say the least. Multiple vehicles slid off the road in the time we were driving north and by the time we got to Tacoma, the roads were either ice or buried in snow.
We made it back safe but in dropping off one of my cohorts, I made the mistake of trying to take on a not-so-gentle decline to get back to the freeway. The slide started and the car began to spin to the right as we rapidly approached a stop sign and the intersection at the bottom of the hill. Luckily, my experience growing up in Eastern Oregon where NOTHING shuts down because of snow and drifting is a fun pastime, I didn’t panic and we avoided contact with any signs or walls.
There was obviously nobody else on the road at 2 AM on a snowy night, so once we came to a stop, we continued about our business.
I’m pretty sure the very first time I got called to do WWE extra work, when I had a match on RAW against Braun Strowman (humble brag), we had another experience with snow on the way down to Portland but nothing as severe as what I just described. But not all wrestling-adjacent inclement weather is related to WWE. There was a WrestleSport event in January of 2017 that emanated from the Artists Repertory Theater in Portland, OR and by the time the show ended, the snow was already piling up on the roads.
The drive home was similarly treacherous to the WWE story, but luckily did not end with a slide down a snowy hill into an open intersection. There’s also been some iffy drives through the Coquihalla Pass on the way to Invasion Championship Wrestling in Kelowna, BC, one such drive that comes to mind is when one car (my car) left extremely early in the morning when the snow had just started to fall, passing cars that had slid into the median/ditches on the side of the road, and the passes being closed down a few hours after our departure. There are other stories of shows being canceled due to snow. Those stories are pretty much, “I just stayed home and played Pokemon instead.”
Anyway, that’s my bi-weekly rant for this chapter of Notorious Notes. Snow can be bad y’all, but there’s also no reason to panic. Just don’t be an idiot and everything will be fine. That said, I currently have snow tires on my vehicle and always carry an emergency kit just in case. Thanks for bearing with me!
The world is your burrito!
Upcoming Dates:
- January 24: 321 Battle – Seattle, WA
- February 1: Lucha Libre Volcanica – Seattle, WA
- February 8: TBA
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