Spring: It's Lethal and Lovely

It has always been a threat as well as a promise. It entices the winter-weary by flaunting balmy temperatures, azure skies and buds bursting into blazing color. Children break out their bicycles, college students recline and pretend to study on the mall, and Americans of all ages tilt pale faces to catch the first warming rays of the sun.

But just as surely as it woos them, spring rebuffs its admirers, slapping them with stinging hail, destructive tornadoes and rapacious rivers. After the worst winter on record, spring's capriciousness last week was especially cruel, endurable in some areas only because of the certainty that better days were just ahead.

April turned savage in Georgia, hurling a Southern Airways DC-9 to the ground under a barrage of hail, and killing 70 people. In Alabama, where twisting tornadoes leveled a middle-class suburb of Birmingham, 20 died.

Heavy rains in the Appalachian hill country of eastern Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia and Virginia sent some rivers rolling to their highest flood levels in a century. As the Big Sandy, Cumberland and Kentucky gushed over their banks in Kentucky (a national guardsman described "a big whooshing noise"), five people were swept to their deaths and 7,600 families fled. When they returned, their homes were gone, or wrecked by water and mud.

Near Pikeville, a small coal center along the Big Sandy, people endured the rain and the resulting flood. Then a fire, touched off by leaking gasoline, destroyed the town library, a telephone-company building and a house. Finally, it snowed. In aptly named Hazard, Ky., Charlie Hammonds, a gas-station operator, managed to take calamity in stride. His reason: "This is the 26th time I've been flooded since I came here in 1957." At Jack's Union 76 Service Station near Sneedville, Tenn. (pop. 1,000). Owner Jack Stapleton even found cause for cheer, though the Clinch River had risen a record 26 ft. above its banks, sweeping away houses and barns. "The river is going down," he said. "Nobody got killed or hurt bad. The sun is shining, and the birds are singing."

Spring was still silent in parts of New England and the Midwest, beset by low temperatures and snow. In the tiny hamlet of Sears Pond, near Watertown in northern New York, an incredible 42 in. of snow remained on the ground, but no wonder, since residents there were claiming they had measured an alltime record winter snowfall for an area east of the Rockies: 450 in. Let out of their stalls for the first time in months, local cows kicked up their heels like horses.

Come what might--or May--much of the nation was caught up in the spirit of renewal. When the wet season in Northern California turned up bone dry, about 2,000 San Franciscans, a few dressed in foul-weather gear, staged a modern rain dance in the Hyatt Regency hotel. They foxtrotted to Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head, April Showers and Stormy Weather. The dance was not dry; the weather stayed dry.

Place to Forget. In Southern California, where spring is only a date on a calendar, some 1,200 auto vans converged on coastal Santa Maria for an annual outing. The owners, whose carpeted and stereoed vehicles cost $10,000 or more, reveled in the escapist mood of spring. "It's a place to forget your troubles, your religion, your color, your hang-ups, your job--even your kids--if you want to," exulted one vanner, who calls herself Lady Van-Detta.

Along the shores of Lake Michigan, twinkling lights showed that the smelt were running again. The night netters scooped up the silvery fish (3-in. to 13-in. long) as they dashed for deeper water after spawning. They are fried and eaten whole. "It's like pulling French fries out of the lake," explained one delighted fisherman.

Although snow flurries chilled Chicago, some 200,000 people attended the Chicago Horticultural Society's annual flower and garden show. Farmers in nearby states looked contentedly at leaden skies, which dropped enough rain or snow to bring new hope for decent crops to the parched plains of Kansas, Iowa, the Dakotas, Nebraska and Minnesota. "It came just the way we like it, nice and slow," Iowa Hog Farmer Bob Helmbrecht said of the springtime moisture. A National Weather Bureau official called it simply "a godsend."

As always, that fifth season--"mud" --oozed through Vermont and New Hampshire, where the coo of the mourning dove gave way to the growl of four-wheel-drive vehicles pulling unsuspecting travelers out of the region's annual goo. The 949 frugal residents of Plainfield, Vt., authorized a study to see if they should keep their dirt roads--potholes and all--instead of paving them with expensive, and unprofitable, asphalt.

To mark the coming of the new season, the town clock in Cohasset, Mass., was dismantled and given its first cleaning in 111 years. In rural Andover, Conn.. a daring reform was suggested to permit secret balloting instead of voting by the traditional showing of hands at town meetings. The old practice was retained--on a vote taken, just this once, by secret ballot.

Blustery winds and a brief snow flurry in New York City failed to slow the brisk sale of petunias, azaleas, tulips and hydrangeas; apartment dwellers were determined to bring touches of nature into their steel-and-concrete towers. Bird lovers crowded the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge as they sought to spot the first glossy ibis, dowitchers and lesser yellowlegs of the season. Members of the Appalachian Mountain Club went hunting for fiddlehead ferns.

The South that had escaped the storms and floods was abloom with forsythia, magnolias and the ubiquitous azalea. Teetering on skateboards, the young skittered along paved river levees. The largest crowd (54,000) ever to watch a horse race in the Deep South whooped for the favorite at the Arkansas Derby in Hot Springs, and were rewarded when their choice, Clev Er Tell, won. In Round Top, Texas (pop. 64), visitors from Houston, looking for an excuse to take a short (100-mile) drive, attended the Antiques Fair and Winedale Spring Festival. They hoped to fleece the local merchants out of old buckets, ice chests and garden tools. "Hey, you know where I can get a deal on a wash kettle?" one city slicker asked General Store Owner Odies Schatte. "You're not gonna find one," said Schatte. "People bought them all up, drilled holes in the bottom and turned them into planters. If you had one, you'd probably be able to get $150 for it." Which was precisely what the visitor had in mind.

In Cincinnati, the wind-chill factor was 14DEG F., and there were 3 in. of new snow. So what? The groundskeepers cleared the field at Riverfront Stadium, and 51,937 fans showed up to watch the world champion Reds open the season by beating the San Diego Padres 5-3. Worries such as an arms agreement with the Soviet Union seemed and were a world away. There were tomatoes to plant (seeds for vegetable gardens were headed for record sales coast to coast), morel mushrooms to find, robins to welcome, the Masters golf tournament to watch. Yes, and income taxes to be paid. But after the great and onerous winter of '77, the beaches would beckon, and life would be pleasant again. Such were the vernal promises, and Americans' individual hopes, as the year's most fickle season vented its varied whims.

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