Ed Park
1.
Buffalo’s infamous Blizzard of ’77 began at 11 a.m. on Friday, January 28. Weathermen knew things could get messy, but it was worse than anyone imagined. “It came almost without warning,” one witness wrote, “roaring across Lake Erie with the fury of a stampeding herd of elephants!”
“For 17 hours it raged, snow being whipped by winds reaching 69 miles per hour,” the correspondent continued. The wind chill made it feel like fifty below. Drivers could not see, and their tires got stuck. More than twenty people died, stranded in their vehicles as the temperature dropped. According to the same witness, “Buffalo looked like a section of the world stilled by radioactive fallout.”
The wind raged for four more days, impeding aid efforts, and road travel was restricted. On February 5, President Jimmy Carter declared the city a disaster area.
2.
I was six when it happened. I remember opening our heavy wooden front door out of curiosity and being confronted with a wall of white. The snow was heaped against the glass outer door, all the way to the top. I remember not having school for a week, and my dad staying home from the hospital—though he’d been informed that helicopters would be available to airlift any doctors. (My dad, a psychiatrist, did not take up the offer.)
That door of snow, pounded flat against the glass, loomed like a giant piece of paper——blank, untouched. Now I see it as a page from the future, on which I would inscribe my memories of home.
3.
When the blizzard hits, graphic artist Charles Marino gets stranded on a road thirty miles from his Buffalo home. He makes it to a fire station, where other storm-tossed commuters hunker down. They play cards, shoot the breeze, catch some shuteye. A few days later, when conditions have improved somewhat, Marino finally gets back to see his wife, Donna, and their young son, Paul. The boy has played endlessly with a set of toy cars, as if by guiding them around the floor, he can free his father’s car from the snow and bring it home.
Marino is safe——grateful for the kindness of strangers, thankful he’s made it back. The weather is still bad, though, and he anticipates work will be at a standstill for a while. Cabin fever sets in.
Seeing the toy cars, safe on imaginary streets, disorients Marino. Gives him a god-like view, a fantasy of his real car existing at that scale. The immediacy of the entire ordeal fades. How will the city remember the Blizzard of ’77? Carter has made his declaration, but will it all be forgotten, as ephemeral as melted snow?
Charles Marino has an idea.
4.
In the summer of 1977, mere months after the most devastating weather event in Buffalo’s memory, thousands of copies of a new board game hit local shelves. The top of the box is as grim as an obituary: BLIZZARD PARALYZES WESTERN NEW YORK, it proclaims in bold letters, and gives a meaty play-by-play of the deadly weather the city has so recently endured. (The descriptive copy is the “witness” quoted above.) The teaser ends with a desperate quote from Mayor Makowski: “This city is fighting for its life.” Then the come-on, sober yet irresistible: Now you can relive the excitement caused by one of nature’s fiercest storms with CHAR-DONN’s entertaining and new family game, THE BLIZZARD OF ’77™ TRAVEL GAME.
The company moniker sounds menacing, like a dark demi-deity out of Middle-earth, but it’s in fact just the spliced and adumbrated conjunction of Charles and Donna Marino’s names. The front lid reproduces two black-and-white photos, tinted in a hazy blue shade of winter: a mysterious cluster of lumps that turns out to be a snow-swamped parking lot, and a bus straining against the elements, while an indistinct gray figure trudges nearby. A white-lined Zephyrus blows snow from the west.
TRAVEL GAME, printed in light blue under the name of the disaster, is an ironic misnomer. This is a game in which travel is entirely local and maddeningly static. You just want to get home. BO77TGis The Odyssey set in Western New York, with frozen gas lines and stalled buses in place of the Lotus Eaters and the Cyclops.
5.
The tactile paraphernalia is familiar: wooden tokens shaped like cars, a pair of dice, two decks of specialized cards à la Monopoly. The game board, too, appears almost laughably typical. We start on the clement Sunny Side, the palette all yellow and orange, a simplified rectilinear map of Buffalo. Players roll to move their cars along familiar thoroughfares (Youngmann Highway, Scajaquada Expressway), visiting five “destination circles” (to pick up food, money, medication, etc.). The winner is the first to return safely home. Peppering the board are eight blue spaces, evenly distributed. Landing on one requires the player to draw a card from the deck marked WEATHER. These mostly represent mild setbacks, such as SNOW BLANKET, showing the front of a vehicle lightly anthropomorphized with eyeballs in the headlights and a frowning fender, and reading: “Your car and the streets are being covered with a heavy blanket of snow. LOSE ONE TURN.” Each bears one of Marino’s delightfully clean-lined illustrations.
Occasionally, the card conveys a spot of good news: BLUE SKIES gives the drawer a free turn, and LIGHT SNOW has a rosy take on a very 1977-specific scenario: “Children have been home from school because of the Gas Crisis. They’re happy to see more snow continue to fall.” (This homebound happiness, as if anticipating the treacherous conditions in store, somehow translates to moving ahead three spaces.)
But no one wins the game when the sun is out. All is rosy illusion. Tucked amid the deck are four cards that state:
It doesn’t matter who draws this card. The world——the game——changes immediately, for everybody.
6.
With that fateful draw, players memorize their position, put away the rest of the Weather Card deck——it won’t be needed any more——and flip the board over. For someone who’s never played before, the abrupt change in visuals might have them howling with laughter. The game has instantly become excruciating, and there’s no going back. We have irrevocably entered the Blizzard side: a replica of the previous map’s layout, but gone are the cheery colors. How to even navigate this winter blunderland, in which virtually any space you land on triggers an ill effect?
This is the gameplay equivalent of the kids in Stranger Things visiting the Upsidedown, that treacherous nightmare land, mapped onto the landmarks of their everyday suburban milieu.
7.
BO77TG was a big hit, reportedly selling 40,000 copies in less than a month. In the coming years, after other communities (Akron, Detroit, Philly) got walloped with their own epic whiteouts, Char-Donn realized it had a flexible template: by swapping street names and other hyperlocal details, the product could sell into a new region. Merino would develop other games, but his fame rests on the Blizzard franchise, which took thirty markets by storm, and can be regarded as one of the first tabletop climate-change games.
8.
Once the Blizzard side of the board has been revealed, movement slows to a crawl; instead of two dice, you roll one. Next, you’re faced with a minefield of bad options. You might experience a stalled car (lose 1 turn) or ACCIDENT! (ditto), encounter a “semi-trailer jack knifed” (lose 2 turns), hit zero visibility (go half speed on the next roll, i.e., 1-3 spaces max), or find that you have a dead battery (go to the gas station). Every so often, the cops catch you defying the mayor’s travel ban (go to jail, where you lose 2 turns).
In place of the Weather Card spaces of the Sunny Side are squares requiring one to draw from the other deck——the “Blizzard ’77” cards. (Whither the “of”?) HURRY, HURRY, HURRY says one. “You must quickly hide from the raging BLIZZARD,” it reads. “Go to the nearest shelter (gas-station, jail, home, or errand circle). REMAIN THERE FOR 3 TURNS.”Marino’s drawn a well-dressed man clutching a lamppost as the wind removes his hat, his face scrunched——and dare I say, somewhat Asian-looking. It’s a typically charming illo that subliminally keeps things “fun” even as the Sisyphean misery persists.
8.
Though I saw the BO77TG game in stores when I was growing up, I never had a chance to play. Forty-five years later, while working on my novel, I found myself writing scenes set during the blizzard. I scoured old newscasts on YouTube. The imagery brought to mind the titular song by Nada Surf, with the lyric “the cars were just lumps in the snow.” I froze some footage and clipped out this anonymous figure, put it in my book. Which character did it correspond to? Whoever this person was, I saw myself (already several years into an all-consuming book) in the angle of the body, the bleakness of the environment——it was like me trying to go ever deeper into my past, to recover these memories of Buffalo in the seventies.
9.
I wound up buying the game off eBay, and invited (or forced) my family to play with me. Novelty aside, there’s enjoyment to be had in the sheer perversity of the design. The cleverest player has no edge over anyone else; the dice and cards forestall any real strategy. But isn’t this, in a way, an accurate representation of what the Blizzard of ’77 was like? Think of Charles Marino, seeking shelter after snow swallows his car, realizing that his half-hour trip home is not going to end any time soon. Picture him cloistered in the firehouse, fishing for a dime so he can call Donna and Paul and tell them he’s safe, while knowing that others were not so lucky. Though the play can feel interminable, at least in the game, no one ever dies.
Around the same time as I was bidding on BO77TG, my parents sold the house where I grew up. The decision was made quickly, and my sister and I barely had time to drive back from New York to say goodbye. It was a lovely Western New York afternoon, and all the things were gone now: just walls, windows, floors. The house seemed impossibly large without furniture, yet also reduced to something like its original state. The carpets in my former bedroom and on the staircase and in the living room had been switched out years ago for a uniform ivory. I remember on certain winter nights, with the lights off so as not to wake anyone, I would walk downstairs and the carpet would be purified by stray moonlight or streetlight streaming through the large ovoid window and give the illusion that I was treading on snow, careful not to slip, in an edifice hewed of crystalline ice. But as I made my farewell rounds that day, I recalled how my room’s carpet had been maroon, my sister’s a frosted green, my parents’ a light blue, and the guest room a sunny yellow. The upper hall had been golden. I said goodbye to the family room fireplace with its large stone that, at age five, I used to think looked like (indeed, hoped was) a dinosaur skull. I stared at the foyer tiles, mottled swirls of olive and brown, unchanged since day one, and I looked one last time at the thick wooden door I had opened that January morning so long ago, like a polar portal to Antarctica. Outside the grass was green. I remember as a kid I once wrote my name in tiny letters, on patches of stucco along the staircase. It was my secret, binding me to the house. I looked for the signatures, but they were nowhere to be found, as though the white stucco had swallowed them up, like so many drifts of snow erasing every human trace.
Ed Park is the author of the novels Same Bed Different Dreams (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize) and Personal Days (finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award) and the story collection An Oral History of Atlantis (forthcoming July 29). He lives in Manhattan and teaches creative writing at Princeton.