Among the stranger sights at the height of our snowstorm's second act might have been the couple - dressed in shorts and T-shirts - walking blissfully along Pratt Street. Love, or an abundance of spirits, apparently conquers all, including the elements.

"They were hand in hand," recalled a smiling, almost disbelieving Reggie Coates, who watched the snow waltz that was captured on a surveillance camera and shown live on the big screen to delighted workers hunkered down in Baltimore's Emergency Operations Center.

One of the most blatantly illegal things Coates saw was a car speeding the wrong way on a deserted, snow-blinded and ordered-closed-by-the-mayor Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

Bad weather begets strange behavior.

Rules, and sometimes common sense, are suspended.

You could get arrested for driving but not for jaywalking. A couple got engaged, chilled champagne in a snowbank and drank it on the street, a state lawmaker egging them on. A man pulled a plastic sleigh filled with open Budweisers down the middle of Light Street in Federal Hill. An ATV driver tailgated a city cop, a frolic both drivers seemed to enjoy.

It's not that there are no rules, there are just different rules, adjusted along with routines to make the day a bit more fun and a bit more bearable.

Meanwhile, laws we barely knew existed suddenly disrupted our already shaken routines. Those snow emergency signs, oft-ignored and laughed at because there seems no earthly reason for them, for example. And what's that about some law that sometimes requires that your car have snow tires or chains? By now, we all know exactly what snow emergency phase we're in - like we used to know the terrorism alert color - and what it means, even if we choose to ignore it.

All this leads to the question: What can you get away with during a snowstorm that you wouldn't think of doing on a bright, sunny day? And at what point during the messy aftermath do you go from bending the rules to be resourceful and daring to breaking the law to be a criminal and stupid?

It is a question that Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III wrestled with as he toured the city and met with his officers. The laws do not ease as snow accumulates, but the practicality of enforcing them diminishes. The city's top cop told me that he told his offers to use "common sense."

Yes, the mayor banned cars from roads as Wednesday's storm became dangerous, but Bealefeld said he didn't want officers chasing down drivers or standing in the street to flag them down. He told them their job was first to save lives and then to save property. He gave me an example of an excuse he heard from a driver who started his explanation for an illegal act with "I have an emergency."

The man's "emergency"?

"I have to pick up my friend at a bar."

When I told the commissioner I was writing about crimes people can get away with during a storm, he immediately volunteered "walking in the street." He said he worried all weekend that people would be run over, but it certainly wasn't a violation his cops were going to target.

The mayor had already indicated lax enforcement of a law prohibiting people from reserving freshly dug out parking spaces on public streets. And during the whiteout, it was safer to walk on a deserted road than on icy trails cut through winding, uncleared sidewalks.

Baltimore's criminals, in Bealefeld-speak, are cretins, thugs and fools, so it might be a little dangerous to rely on common sense to dictate behavior. He has repeatedly grown frustrated at having to police common sense.

"I told my guys to exert a great deal of discretion and diplomacy," the commissioner said.

Crime seemed to drop as the snowbanks rose. During the 24-hour period that ended at midday Thursday, only three serious crimes were reported - two street robberies and a commercial burglary - prompting Bealefeld to proclaim: "In the entire city, this is, like, incredible." A few hours later, about 8:30 that night, a man was shot in leg, but that turned out to have been self-inflicted.

But if we're not bashing each other's heads in or selling mounds of heroin from corners (what corners?), we're parking with reckless abandon. At angles in parallel spots. Pointed the wrong way. Cars entombed on snow-clogged emergency routes, prolonging the agony of drivers and of residents eager for a plow to free them from their neighborhoods.

During the storm, we sped (OK, we crawled or slid) through red lights, surmising that side streets were blocked so nothing could hit us. If we stopped or slowed, we'd risk losing traction on the icy street. Red lights seem inconvenient in a natural disaster.

We also seemed to think that we no longer had to pay to park. Most meters are on snow emergency routes anyway, so even motorists who paid were susceptible to losing their car to a tow truck. And it's possible that many people had parked and paid before the storm, only to find their cars impossibly trapped days later.

But on Thursday, with main streets down to bare pavement and shovelers and plows on practically every corner, I found a line of cars parked on Redwood Street, between Light and Calvert, without receipts visible in the dash. One car covered with snow had been there for a while, but the others were clean and an employee shoveling out a nearby hotel entrance said the drivers had parked there that morning.

The ticket machine was covered with snow and, yes, you'd have to summit a small mountain to reach it, but there was a single footprint in front, a tell-tale sign that someone had at least tried. Meters are still in operation, city officials told me, but parking officers are concentrating on abandoned cars blocking travel lanes and cars parked illegally along emergency routes. At that moment, routine parking violations were not exactly a priority.

"The situation," said Peter Little, the Parking Authority's director, "changes everybody's jobs and the rules."

Thursday morning, it was still acceptable to walk in the street, but that privilege waned as the day went on, the temperature soared to a few degrees above freezing and people (some, anyway) finally shoveled. But early Friday, those same sidewalks iced over, and the streets once again became pedestrian thoroughfares.

And a new way to flout the law has emerged - snowdrifts resculpted the roads, requiring drivers to ignore lane markings to navigate even a straight street.

Gradually, as the snow goes away, the old rules and etiquette return. We go back to walking on sidewalks, we give up pulling beer in sleds, we stop for red lights and we pay to park.

The cops gave us a temporary pass on some rules and enforced others we'd never heard of. We emerged drained but safe, exhausted but alive, with a two-day reprieve from the crime that has made us infamous.

To the citizens and his cops, Bealefeld exclaimed: "I say, 'Job well done.' "

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