February 15, 2010
I'm trying to get into the Olympic spirit, but the more I see and read and hear on the radio, the more I wonder if everyone up there--the athletes, the media, the families and the crowds--aren't wishing they all could just pack it up, go home and come back when it's colder, and there's decent snow, and everyone (along with the Canadians) has had a chance to practice, and no one has just died, like, right over there... ("Oh look! It's much safer now!")
Oddly in Seattle we are no "closer" to the games than anyone else--the Canadian TV broadcast is inaccessible here, and there is an odd absence of local coverage or interest. Despite being 2 1/2 hours away (plus border crossing time) the Games seem no more present than if they were in Helsinki, or on Mars.
Not that I am a snow person. I don't ski or ice skate; I just took up snowshoeing recently and I dread driving in the white stuff so much that I prefer the Seattle wet to the rest of the country's current white. Yet I live amongst snow bunnies of all shapes and sizes, and their enthusiasm rubs off on me even as I put another Dura-log on the fire and shiver at the thought of yet another day of the thermometer staying below 55 degrees F.
In the anticipated wake of what I fear will be deemed a dismal performance by our jewel of a northern neighbor, I wonder if there ought not develop some groundswell for an Olympics that fairly represents the climate and activities of the winter Pacific Rim--some sort of Slushathon, I guess, in which steady warm rain on top of a snow base somewhat thinner than the lining in an old-school down jacket would be considered optimum conditions; where hockey is played in a Safeway parking lot,the luge is restricted to off-season water slides and the biathlon is mercifully, utterly absent. We could still hold figure skating contests--we have a few venues for that--but we might also have some kind of umbrella dancing. We like to imagine that the local word for umbrella is "Bumbershoot," which no one actually has ever said, but it sounds cool, so perhaps "Bumbershooting," if you will; couples with umbrellas pirouetting gracefully in enormous puddles, perhaps pushing baby strollers through traffic. Now we're talking Northwest sport.
Just a thought.
