Snow devastated the East Coast last weekend, hitting cities as far south as DC and dumping at least two feet of snow on Central Park. Shockingly, Winter Storm Jonas skipped right over the Great State of Maine, especially avoiding the little hamlet of Brunswick. Even Boston, hit with a record-breaking winter in 2015, was spared from Jonas’ wintery claws. However, despite the lack of fresh snow at Bowdoin, around 100 students still faced maddening delays as they attempted to return to campus.
Sandro Cocito ’19 was flying through Baltimore and his flight was cancelled. He finally got back to Bowdoin, but missed his Monday and Tuesday classes.
Unlike many of the weary winter travellers, Cocito was not attempting to leave a state buried in snow.
As Cocito explained, “In New Orleans there was no snow, and in Maine there was no real snow, so I was flying from a place with no snow to a place with no snow and still got stuck.”
Cocito, however, was thrilled to have a couple of extra days of break, unlike some students.
Kelsey Gallagher ’17 had been in Brunswick for the last two weeks of break, doing Wilderness First Responder Training.
“I felt lucky knowing that I didn’t have to miss any of my first day of classes,” she said, noting that she would have probably been bereft to be absent.
Mimi Paz ’17 didn’t miss class, but was nonetheless stuck for hours in Philadelphia on her commute from Los Angeles.
She was trapped for roughly four hours, and expressed frustration about arriving to Maine and not finding the winter wonderland she had been so excited for.
“I was like, what the beep!” she said. “I watched it on the news and I was like, oh, my gosh, it’s a blizzard! But it wasn’t.”
Maggie Seymour ’16 foresaw the impending doom brought forth by the snowstorm and struck out two days early for Bowdoin.
“I was pretty salty about it. I wanted to stay at home,” said Seymour, forced from the cozy confines of her Baltimore, MD home on Friday rather than Sunday. She had to drive through the night on Friday because she had made plans at home during the day. All in all, she describes her entire experience as “a pain.” However, she was pleased with her choice to flee early, because had she not, she would have been “stuck for the week.”
The worst story that fell upon the Orient’s ears would be the tragic tale of Kevin Zmozynski ’16. Zmozynski hails from Cleveland, and was supposed to return to campus on Sunday, flying from Ohio to Newark to Portland. All of his flights were cancelled. The determined Zmozynski then proceeded to spend a total of seven hours on hold with the airline as he tried to reschedule his trip back. He was able to snag a flight back on Tuesday, but alas, it too was cancelled.
“I thought okay, I’ll be good to go since it’s Tuesday,” said the repeatedly rebuffed Zmozynski, “It was ridiculous.”
Zmozynski ended up opting to fly to Chicago in order to get to Portland since the airlines wanted to route him through the storm’s epicenters, New York or DC.
“I ended up going West to go East,” he said.
And yet, despite the snow-fueled drama and delays transpiring across many a state, no new snow fell in Brunswick according to eyewitnesses. Luke Carberry ’18, also already stationed on campus, notes, “It was a normal weekend.”
He explained, “[The storm] hit all up the east coast and it snows a lot in Maine, so you would have thought it would hit us too.”
However, Carberry was “not shocked” to hear of his fellow students’ delays
“It was forecasted that they wouldn’t be able to make it to school. I expected them to not be here, and they were not here,” he said.