Curious Coincidences

Have you ever felt like the heavens have conspired against you?  I have, and I’m not too happy about it.  Let me provide you some seemingly compelling evidence for this divine intervention in my life by tracking backwards in my career.

Let’s begin with the recent snowstorms in Virginia.  National Public Radio labeled our recent weather in early February an “epic storm.”  Prior to my move this past summer back to my home state from Florida, I judiciously interviewed some fellow Virginians about the winters in the Roanoke Valley.  “Don’t worry,” they responded gleefully.  “Our winters here have been mild ones for years now.”  Thus far this season, we’ve already endured the 9th snowiest winter dating to 1912, and it won’t take much more to get us all the way to 6th.  Snowmageddon, President Obama is calling it.  Hmm.

When I moved into Pinellas County, Florida in late Summer 2004 to direct a land conservation program for local government, the Sunshine State was hit by four major hurricanes.  Remember Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne?  Those storms contributed to one of the deadliest and most costly Atlantic hurricane seasons on record.  The last three were direct hits on Pinellas County, of course, where I lived and worked.  Hmm.

Years ago, when I was about to set up the field work for my Ph.D. dissertation in the mountains of Puerto Rico, my first flight from Tampa to San Juan was cancelled out of the blue on a beautiful late-summer day.  Why?  An exploding volcano on the nearby island of Montserrat dumped tons of ash on the airport, thus closing it for nearly a week.  Hmm.

Throughout my doctoral program, I endured cancelled flights due to snow storms, ice storms, wind storms, thunderstorms, and even dense fog across the country and abroad – so many cancellations, in fact, that some “friends” refused to board any flight with me on the passenger manifest.  And, just after I started a decade-long sojourn in New York’s Mid-Hudson Valley way back in the 1980s, I asked the locals, “When does it start snowing in Millbrook?”  It was raining cats and dogs at that very moment in early October: the now-infamous night of October 3rd.  “Oh, don’t worry,” they responded cheerfully.  “We won’t get our major snows until January or February.”  That night, it snowed one and a half feet during a “freak storm” (labeled as such by the local weather station) that only blanketed my location in the Mid-Hudson Valley.  Hmm.

And don’t even get me started on near-countless airport delays and diverted flights because of weather-related headaches.  One summer I even sat in an overheated plane on the tarmac at LaGuardia for 6 hours because of bad weather and other issues at Dulles International, our destination.  What a nightmare!

Storms – lots of them.  Volcanoes – at least one.  What next?  A meteor strike?  Colleagues and students alike, who know about this meteorological trend in my life, call it the “Rinker Effect.”  Does my evidence convince you about any heavenly conspiracy?  Or are they all just curious coincidences?  You see, whatever it is, it’s been going on for years now.

They say everything happens for a reason.  Who are “they” anyway?  A bunch of smarty-pants, I’m sure of it.  And couldn’t the reason be no reason whatsoever … except perhaps for a lucky or unlucky draw of life’s cards?

According to the “Book of Odds” (www.bookofodds.com), December ranks as the worst month for flying: 1 in 3.23 flights is delayed and 1 in 30.65 flights is cancelled.  February is worse yet for cancellations: 1 in 27.64 flights.  In contrast, October seems the best time to fly with 1 in 7.57 flights delayed and 1 in 171.2 flights cancelled.  As with delays and cancellations, diversions peak in the winter: 1 in 224.1 flights as opposed to May with 1 in 709.9 diverted flights.  Ah, lovely May.

So it stands to reason that, if you fly a lot during any time of the year, especially during the winter months, you’re bound to face delayed, diverted, or cancelled flights.  It’s just plain statistics, right?

That there are people who have actually spent hours calculating all these odds tells me that they, too, have wondered – way deep inside – if the gods are bullies toward us poor primates, picking on hapless blobs of bipedal protoplasm on our speck of dust somewhere in the Milky Way.

Have we divined any extraordinary influences in our day-to-day lives, airline flight cancellations notwithstanding?

For that matter, have we divined any extraordinary influences in the great evolutionary history of life on Earth?  Not yet, anyway.  Did Somebody (that is, Somebody with a really big “S”) really mean to construct the planet and all its marvelous complexity exactly as we know it?  Was it all inevitable?  Was it a numerical certainty?  Just like we can’t put God under a microscope or peer at Him through a telescope, we have not yet found Him lurking in the statistical details of an ancient universe.  So who knows for sure?

“Everything happens for a reason,” they say.  Either that’s a threadbare cliché or a ludicrous twist on the equally vacuous statement that “Well, it was meant to be.”  Statistically speaking, I guess I can understand all those storms and volcanoes peppered throughout my career.  Given enough time, even a chimp can peck out Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” on a laptop.  But what are the odds that one person – namely, me – will live through Snowmageddon, a freak storm, an erupting volcano, and all those other pan flashes of ill luck in the course of a decade or two?

What’s my retort to all the homespun wisdom?  I shrug my shoulders and offer humbly, “It is what it is.”

No, I really don’t think God’s a bully.  And, like Einstein, I don’t think He throws dice all day, coolly calculating the odds for or against our feeble lives – all 6.8 billion of us humans plus 12,000 blue whales, 300,000 wild chimps, 2000 Bengal tigers, and one Snowdonia hawkweed–that’s right, one single solitary plant, making it the world’s rarest flowering plant.  I guess He could throw dice all day; how would I know?  Some say God can do anything, being omnipotent and all, but is that really true?  For example, can God take away free will?  Can He put effect before cause?  Can He do evil?  But I digress.

If I did think my bad meteorological luck was willed by God, then I’d also have to say with equal certainty that God willed a certain migrating bird to fall into the ocean or a certain flower to wilt on its stem or a certain worm to get squashed underfoot after a spring rainstorm or a certain blackfly to bite a certain caribou on a certain part of its nose or ….  I think you get the picture: it is what it is.  Why would something be less certain and deserve less attention from God simply because it’s not human?  Whether plant or animal, them’s the chances we take on our walk, or flight, or crawl through life.  Such events are nothing more, nothing less than curious coincidences.

But, from all those facts and figures in the “Book of Odds,” it sure does seem to me that God likes the spring, especially May.

Did I tell you that my birthday’s in May?