Disqualified

Yesterday Tom officially removed Coloradans from his mental list of People Who Know How to Deal with Winter. Coloradans on the Front Range, at least, have shown us that they do not take winter weather in stride. Despite the fact that we've had less than 6 inches of snow this season, school has been canceled for three of the last six days and four days total so far in 2011. Yesterday's cancellation was due to a dusting of snow (no need to break out a shovel or boots) and 7-degree temps at dawn. This morning there was still a dusting of snow and 7-degree temps, but the kids went back to school, to the bafflement of my Finnish neighbor trying to figure out the logic in this system. All the kids made it onto the bus and to school without any problem this morning, just as they made it to all the other places their parents took them yesterday. My colleague who has spent time in Minnesota, and who was trying to juggle her twins with her husband while both parents were teaching, sniffed that our local school boards were just teaching kids to be weak.

And it is school boards, plural. In a city of 186 sq. miles, there are actually multiple school districts within the city, each administered separately (plus several legitimately separate municipalities, like ours), meaning that some neighborhoods had a whole day off while others had a two-hour delay. Some of us went back today, while others had another two-hour delay. A town of 186 sq. miles (by comparison my childhood hometown is 6 sq. mi, while Princeton--Borough plus Township with all outlying rural areas--is 30 sq. mi.) also means that now that Tom is in a job that requires him to be all over the city, we are spending 90 minutes in the car some afternoons, driving 50 miles round-trip, to get us all home from our respective locations.

Interestingly, today I came across a website that rates the walkability of one's home location (www.walkscore.com). For me that's a critical feature in a home--practically and environmentally, to be sure, but also psychologically--and one that I didn't realize anyone out there was measuring. I wasn't surprised when I plugged in everywhere I've lived and discovered that our current location, with its walkability rating of 23 out of 100, does not qualify for any degree of "walkable" status, earning a solid "car-dependent." By contrast all my Northeast residences scored above 50, some in the high 80s. The only place to score lower than our current home was my family's Chapel Hill neighborhood. The ratings seem to be based on the proximity of business and services in a variety of categories, and while I agree that my parents' CH home is close to even fewer businesses than our current location--not walkable to any commercial districts at all, except by my mom when she's in a Saturday-morning marathon hike mood--nevertheless, I think the rating system needs to be tweaked. What I'd like is a system that weighed not just how walkable a place is, but how much time you have to spend driving once you do get in a car (and ideally, how stressful that driving is). In Chapel Hill, you can get to all kinds of useful places in 5-10 minutes of relatively painless driving, twenty minutes if you need to go out to the box stores. In Manitou Springs, twenty minutes gets you to the interstate, which just launches you on your 45-minute trip to the malls.

My system would also weigh the relative usefulness of different businesses (maybe the individual user could weigh specific stores herself at the outset). For example, at our home in Manitou we receive credit for having a bookstore about 1.5 miles away, but the store that pops up is is a tiny New Age healing arts shop, which I'd argue shouldn't get us a higher rating than a location with a Barnes & Noble 2 miles away. (Though I would give a medium-sized, high-quality independent bookstore a higher rating than B&N, I suspect.) Meanwhile, the listed entertainment near our home is some adult erotica shop four miles away and adult cinema five miles away, while the closest clothing is a high-end baby boutique, after which you have to take the 45-minute trip to the malls.

To be fair, there's another version of walkability to consider. If there were an algorithm that weighted relative splendour of the natural sights walkable from one's home, well, Manitou would be off the charts. Some might say this is the trade-off one makes: stunning scenery or urban convenience. What's frustrating is that it doesn't have to be that way. It's not that we're in a beautiful but remote location; we're in a beautiful and highly developed location. It's just that no thought has been given to that development. As one travel writer I was recently reading put it, Colorado Springs is "an untidy, overgrown city, hell-bent on expansion." Travelers in the 19th century were equally disappointed. Take away the mountains, and we have an undistinguished, sprawling urban/suburban scar on the land, the kind at which America excels. I love to imagine what this place would be like with the natural beauty AND lovely, well-considered human planning. Where does one go to find such a combination? As long as we're here, I suspect I'll always feel a warring thrill in the mountains and depression about the daily drives.

***

Since I began this post, it was interrupted by Edith's coming home sick from school. Another day lost. Although to be fair, she has spent a good chunk of both afternoons on Starfall.com, a free phonics-oriented reading website, on which I suspect she learned more than if she had been at school. (And no, that wasn't a tiger mother maneuver--that was her choice, though I heartily endorsed it.) She's on the cusp of reading; she just needs to keep practicing to gain fluency (is that the right word?). But where she had the patience, she  made her way through just about any story or game she tried.

She also reached a milestone today: Age 5 1/2, Edith figures out what makes the world go 'round. As she told me this afternoon, "You used to say you and Daddy work for a living, and I didn't understand. But now I understand. When you work at a job, people give you money for working. And you need that money to buy food to live. Unless you live on a farm."

This evening she started to get sicker, vomiting and complaining of sore throat and stomachache. Alice was a bit off last weekend, so I'm hoping that it was she who got a milder version of this bug first and passed it to her big sister, rather than that Alice is on the verge of contracting something ickier than she already had. We haven't had much sickness at all this year, so we hardly can complain. But I'm headed east this weekend, knock on wood, and I'd rather I didn't leave Tom with two sick kids--or find myself coming down with something as I board the plane. After all, where I'm headed I can walk to a pharmacy, but here Tom would need to bundle the kids into a car to get meds...that is, if it's warm enough to risk going outside at all. :)