I never heard anyone, in person, call it Fern.
The winter storm — still slowly, achingly melting away — was a lot of things.
It was deadly. Thirty-five people died from the cold in Maryland.
It was cultural. In Baltimore, they argued over saving shoveled-out parking spaces. In Annapolis, everyone wanted to know whose sidewalk it is, anyway.
And it was frustrating. Grocery stores were emptied. No salt. Shovel broken. Pizza delivery? Not today, pal.
It was enough to make you rewatch “LOTR,” “Harry Potter,” “Twilight” and “Bridgerton” again from the start. I’m not sure that’s even possible.
But was it, as we media elites tried to tell you, named Fern?
AP style, the journalism god of grammar and usage, commands no-no, not in the language of news.
“Do not use names created by private weather agencies or other organizations.”
The National Weather Service does not name winter storms. The Weather Channel does.
Should we be on a first-name basis with this weather event, birthed by the coupling of the polar vortex and an upper-level atmospheric wave, then married to a low-pressure system fleeing eastward from the Pacific?
The Banner flirted with the idea, but most often we did not call it Fern. No one was harmed.
The Weather Channel blamed X, back when the social media platform entered the zeitgeist in 2011 as Twitter, for its decision to start naming winter storms.
“It was clear that a hashtag would be required for each storm, so information could be filtered,” the private forecaster explained. “The challenge for The Weather Channel was compounded by the fact that the digital unit occasionally sent out Tweets for more than one storm at a time. Predetermined storm names were the only apparent solution.”
It had to pick names that wouldn’t be too common, or confused in those rare moments when winter storms rage across one part of the country while hurricanes twirl across another.
“Names on any of the six lists of Atlantic storm names, on the next two years of Eastern Pacific storm names, or on the list of retired Atlantic storm names are excluded,” the channel explains on its website.
To get to Fern in January, The Weather Channel stormed through Alston, Bellamy, Chan, Devin and Ezra on its North American list.
Who was Fern? It’s a botanical name, and not a common one.
Children of a certain age might remember “Fern Gully: The Last Rain Forest.” I recall it as the 1992 inspiration for James Cameron’s “Avatar.”
Or maybe your heart was broken when Adventure Time, the video-game-turned-TV show, merged a broken Finn with the Grass Sword to create Fern.
It’s much simpler to think about Fern Shen, founding editor and publisher of Baltimore Brew, a feisty local news site.
“Of course, I didn’t want it to be brutal and deadly,” she wrote in an email. “On the other hand, I didn’t want it to turn out to be an over-hyped nothing-burger, leaving my name to be associated with a wimpy washout. (Think Comet Kohoutek).”
She wrote about a guy nicknamed Mad Max, who lives outdoors in Baltimore and was worried about surviving the storm.
Fern, though, appeared only in her byline. She wondered why The Weather Channel would do more with her name.
“Oh yes, so they and everyone else can hype ’em.”
It’s been a year since President Donald Trump chopped 600 jobs at the weather service, culling the climate center in Maryland and forecasting stations around the country.
Who needs the weather service when you’ve got The Weather Channel?
“#Don’tDefundTheNationalWeatherService!” wrote Fern, the journalist.
TV stations use winter storm names. That makes sense.
WBAL and Fox45 did it in Baltimore, as did WMAR and WJZ. The Baltimore Sun and Capital Gazette followed suit, along with stations in D.C.
Does it help to personify a storm? It doesn’t make it less cold, blustery or mind-bendingly frozen to the pavement.
Maybe Fern was a bad choice. If a name helps, Chip might have been a better fit, or maybe Stormy. Frosty would have been OK, too.
When I think of ferns, I think of fiddleheads in a light vinaigrette, verdant and vegetal.
I think of the Christmas fern and the lady fern, the rusty brown of a cinnamon fern. I think of the shrinking fern, which is not a fern at all but a perennial relative of the pea that shrinks when touched.
Winter storms are hard to define by name. That’s why the weather service doesn’t do it, instead tallying inches of ice and snow, counting barometric pressures in millibars and measuring gales by the miles per hour.
It’s why the winter forecast is so often wrong. A degree or two of Fahrenheit up, and snow turns to rain. A compass bearing north, and the wind blows white in York, Pennsylvania, while Baltimore is all wet.
A storm by any other name, Fern is fading, melting slowly, glacially as temperatures slip into the teens again this weekend. Diurnal warming, nocturnal refreezing.
The wind gusted in from the northeast Saturday morning, blowing the fallen snow into crystalline clouds that raced across the sparkling winter sunshine. Weather can be a joyous thing to write about, no matter the name.
The Washington Post never used Fern to describe the storm. I don’t think that’s why it was murdered by its gazillionaire owner, but it was.
I wonder, though, if anyone will write in the poetry of news about a lingering January storm the way that weather muse Martin Weil did in his 60 years at the Post. He was laid off last week along with 300 others.
It’s Super Bowl Sunday, so for today, who cares about the weather? Bring on the Puerto Rican son, Bad Bunny.
“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” the poet Gertrude Stein wrote in “Sacred Emily,” her assault on the conventions of language.
“Loveliness extreme. Extra gaiters. Loveliness extreme. Sweetest ice-cream.”
What does it all mean?
Go ask Fern.
Comments
Welcome to The Banner's subscriber-only commenting community. Please review our community guidelines.