The Saga of the Snowstorm

A PERSONAL NARRATIVE ABOUT TRUST, BLIZZARDS & HARRY POTTER

BY: ELLIOT A. MIRANDA

MAJOR: BA THEATRE STUDIES

HOMETOWNS: MANILA, PHILIPPINES & SINGAPORE

ENGLISH 110 INSTRUCTOR: GEORGE HLAVATY

The Objective | The Project | The Process: Strengths & Challenges | The Lesson | The Text

The Objective

A more sophisticated writing process—including invention, peer responding, revising, and editing—that results in a clear, effective, well edited public

piece.

This convention in Washington DC had several complicated things happening all at once, and it was difficult to find one aspect about it that carried all the way through from start to finish — like a proper plotline. But having the piece proof-read by my peers and subsequently edited until it was able to tell a fluid story not only helped with the quality of the paper overall, but made the final message more effective for the reader.

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The Project This is a paper written for the

personal narrative assignment given at the start of the semester. Students

were asked to select an event they felt was significant and worth writing

about and tell the story in detail, with dialogue and what they learned from

it.

I decided to write about a short but incredibly eventful four days that took place at the start of my winter break

(Dec 2009) involving, but not limited to: a Harry Potter convention, getting snowed into a hotel, hiking through three feet of snow on foot for provisions and getting

two people from Atlanta to Washington DC despite canceled flights. All of this also

happened with me, the author, in the company of perfect strangers who became some of my most trusted friends by the end of the convention.

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Strengths & Challenges

The strength of my project lies in its voice and the storytelling enhanced by that. I am far more

comfortable with writing a narrative piece for English than an analytical one, simply because voice is

something that comes strongly and naturally to me. Telling this story and drawing in the reader with

the outrageousness of the events detailed in the paper is the winning quality of this project in my opinion.

The challenge I faced with this assignment is that I had so much to tell and wanted to tell it all, but

could only pick one thing so I could write a solid paper. Editing was also a problem for that same reason in that

I felt chopping out certain parts made the story more confusing, although in the end, I realised that it only

made the piece more cohesive.

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The LessonThis project taught me the importance of peer reviewing and editing. This is hardly something new, but this is the first time I have chosen to write about something almost no one could relate to or understand and so it was doubly important for me to have an objective perspective on the story and see how it translated to people who were not there with me. This project taught me how to write for an audience and not just for myself: I’ve been a blogger for years, so breaking the habit of writing a story to the general public and focusing it to a specific audience was new. I’ve never had to actually name the audience of my papers before, so doing that was a new experience and it definitely helped me focus my paper (the audience being “people who think people on the internet are dangerous/creepy”).

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The Text: Saga of the Snowbank

Any outside observer, any person who has never made a connection with a perfect stranger or allowed himself or herself to, would say that that I am crazy. Perhaps I am, and people are free to speculate. But never once on the endless drive to Washington DC from Elon University did I question my sanity or my logic for willingly jumping into this adventure of sorts.

All of us, fifteen men and women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight, united by one thing and one thing alone: Harry Potter. And our love for that series and its characters was enough to draw us together for one weekend in DC from all corners of the United States as well as the world. How did we meet? Well, we signed up for this thing online. One could say we met on the internet. And that explanation alone always sets off alarm bells in the average person’s mind. Long has it been a stereotype that the people you meet online are rapists, murderers, pedophiles, conmen or lonely, socially awkward creepers. Yet despite this stereotype and the warnings from parents and teachers, I can proudly and gladly say that I have met some of my most incredible and trusted friends online. The average person forgets that there is no exception to who surfs the web nowadays and will, more often than not, encounter another average person. Even so, I know I took one hell of a risk in deciding to attend this unofficial Harry Potter convention in Washington DC with absolutely no one I knew. No friend from Elon to accompany me, no relative, no one but me, my suitcases and a heart full of trust.

… continued.

Annette, a senior at UNC Pembroke, contacted me when she saw that I too was headed to DC for this convention. After getting to know her better, I accepted her offer of picking me up from Elon on the way to DC. One of the first rules we are taught as children: do not get into a car with someone you don’t know. But our parents never told us what to do if we knew the person, but not in person. Regardless, I felt my judgment was sound, and when Annette arrived in front of Acorn Coffee Shop at noon, I did not hesitate to jump into the passenger seat of her car and hit the road for what was meant to be a five hour drive… until we ran into the blizzard.

We were supposed to pick up the convention’s organizer, Andy, in Richmond some time in the afternoon. Needless to say, we didn’t reach him on schedule, thanks to visibility being almost down to zero and immovable traffic snaking along the I-95 as far as the eye could hypothetically see. Snow was falling fast and thick, our stomachs were loudly protesting their ravenous states and we had no GPS system to guide the way to our hotel. But we somehow managed to arrive at our destination by 10 PM with no problems other than starvation and cramped legs from long hours of sitting in an over-packed car. A few expected guests to our convention were not as lucky as Annette, Andy, and myself, however, and were very literally trapped in the Atlanta airport before they could get to us. Why? All flights were cancelled “due to inclement weather” by morning. But that didn’t stop the thirteen of us in DC from trying to find a way to get them to the convention. One of the two stuck in Atlanta, Dave, had flown all the way from New Zealand in the hopes of seeing his beloved fiancée in DC over the convention – but she had been forbidden by her family to go at the very last minute. We all decided then and there that we were going to get Dave to his girl in Seattle no matter what. It was this goal – more than just Harry Potter – that united this motley crew of college students, penniless writers, teachers and orchestra conductors.

On the floor of my hotel room, laptop screens glowing with flight schedules and Andy – who we had nicknamed The Commander for organizing the event – taking a much deserved nap in the next room, we bought alternate plane tickets for Dave and Vitaliy (from Russia) in the hopes of getting them to Richmond by the next morning at the earliest. The plan was to get them to Virginia and then send a team in a car, through the worsening blizzard, to pick them up and take them back to DC. With the tickets successfully booked, Gabe, the conductor, joked, “We’ve completed a mission without our Commander!” A declaration which was met with a rousing chorus of “HUZZAH!” from the rest of us, clad in full-on Hogwarts uniforms. When Andy emerged from slumber an hour later, we filled him in; and, after a moment’s consideration, he ordered: “Dig out the cars. Let’s go get Dave and Vit.”

At this time, it was 7 PM (the evening after I arrived), Dave and Vit were set to arrive in Richmond later that night, and our hotel was buried in three feet of snow. Despite that, we dispatched a team of three to Richmond and stayed up the entire night, awaiting their triumphant return with a Kiwi and a Russian in tow. Occasionally, the rescue team, as we began to call them, would contact us, the self-proclaimed command central, and to check in or ask that we look on Google Maps for the Starbucks nearest to their current location. We knew they were fine and could have taken naps at the very least, but we wanted to be there to greet them. Of course, blizzard weather being what it was, they did not return to us by 8 AM the next morning – but not before getting stuck in a snow drift two hours from the hotel. They called us so we could get them a tow truck, then called again to tell us that the tow truck got stuck, so we called the fire department – we all joked that if the fire truck got stuck, we’d have to call the military and send in a tank; that chapter of our weekend later became known as The Saga of the Snowbank.

… continued.

… continued.

It was during these phone calls that we learned of Dave’s horrible allergic reaction to Andy’s wool coat and of Andy’s shoulder – which he’d dislocated a month prior to DC and had managed to aggravate during his driving shift from Richmond to the hotel. So two girls and I volunteered to brave the blizzard before sunrise, hiking through knee-deep snow and unplowed streets (I was, of course, very ill-dressed for this weather with no winter jacket or boots), squinting through the flurries for the nearest CVS in search of antihistamines for Dave and a hot pad for Andy. This was not the first mission sent into the blizzard. The day before, another team of us had ventured into the snow for provisions (because the cheap hotel food was disgusting), dragging a shopping cart full of foodstuffs through the slush to the rest of us. When Dave and the others finally arrived, we pooled money to get him a ticket to Seattle while he slept and the weather cleared – and he eventually did make it to his fiancée by Christmas morning, five days later.

We all did these things for each other voluntarily and none of us expected anything in return. We all knew very little of each other before this long weekend in Washington DC in the dead of winter – and yet, we braved blizzards for each other, spent money on each other without expecting repayment, tended to each other, shared our rooms, our food, offered advice and listening ears. Some of the best and deepest conversations I’ve ever had happened over this weekend on the floors of hotel rooms at four o’clock in the morning. This painfully short but ridiculously eventful and amazing weekend in Washington DC, along with the things we did for each other during it, said so much about a human’s capacity to simply care unconditionally for another – something that is so rare in a day and age where we are brought up to think of yourself first and others second. The connections I made with the people who attended our modest convention still exist today, months later, when they could have easily been severed by distance as we boarded our separate planes and cars and left DC in our wakes. Many people can go their whole lives without being put in the outrageous situations we encountered over four days, but because we managed to get through it all together and successfully, we know we can count on each other for help if one of us absolutely needs it. We are undoubtedly capable of rising above seemingly impossible odds, after all.

I pride myself on being an adventurous risk-taker, but not a stupid one. And going to DC with perfect strangers was a huge risk, I know. Some may argue that this was a stupid risk; but over the course of four days in the winter of 2009, I learned so much about the strength and size of a person’s heart and their ability to be selfless and caring of others. Personally, seeing the exceptional goodness in humanity for one short weekend, when seeing a selfish world through jaded eyes is the norm today, was the farthest thing from a stupid risk. And as Albus Dumbledore once said, “It is our choices that show who we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

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