Greetings all!
I hope this finds everyone well and good and (insert particular bit of small talk that interests you the most here).
Last week we had one of the worst ice storms blow through that I can remember, and I felt it was my moral obligation to share our last week’s misery with you via wildly inaccurate and possibly long-winded narrative description.
It all started a week ago last Sunday—January 2nd. The weather forecasters (who up until this point had been about as accurate as they usually are for us—batting around .400 for the 36 hour forecast) failed to predict not only that it would be drizzling around 7:00 that night, but also that it would be below freezing that whole evening. Thus, by the time I went to bed around 11:00, there was an icy slush starting to form on everything (the weather had been unseasonably warm up to that point, so the ground wasn’t anywhere near frozen—in fact, we still have some green grass in our yard). This worked out especially good for me as I was looking for an excuse, ANY excuse, really, to get out of going to my Inman class that next morning. I mentally prepared the phone call I would make at 7:00 the next morning letting them know that the roads were JUST bad enough that I wouldn’t be able to make it.
Which I did first thing Monday morning, even though the roads really weren’t THAT bad and I probably could have made it if I’d actually wanted to (yeah, go ahead, judge me. You know you’d do it too if you had that kind of control over when you do or don’t go to work). The rest of Monday went by without any addition to the ice on the ground, but the temperatures stayed low enough that nothing melted.
So, by the time the real freezing rain got going around 10:00 a.m., Tuesday, January 4th, we already had something of a head start on the freezing and icing.
Here I should mention that, until this last week, I have spent my last few years with child-like hope in my heart every time the winter skies cloud up. I do, after all, have a job that will let stay home all day if the weather gets bad enough. Every cloudy sky held the hope of a day where I could crawl back into our nicely warmed, electric-blanketed bed and sleep until the next day. Granted, I no longer keep the stack of fresh “emergency” comic books to read while snuggled in bed that I always took care to have in grade school and high school, but, as I grow older, I’m finding sleep a perfect replacement for such material time-wasters. As such, I tend to love the prospects that winter holds. And, admittedly, even though I’ve had my fair share of winter after this last week, I find myself holding that same hope in the back of my head as the weather-person announces that yet another round of ice might be moving in tomorrow night (Tuesday, January 11th).
Anyway, so it was with this sort of giddy anticipation that I watched as the sheets of ice slowly started to build on everything around our house Tuesday morning.
“This is great!” I thought. “No more class for a few days at least!”
So, with nothing on my immediate agenda, I curled up in front of my television and watched some Star Trek repeats on Spike TV. Only I didn’t so much curl up as I sat down in my chair with a small bowl of salted-in-the-shell peanuts. And I didn’t sit down with the intention of watching Star Trek, but found it while I was flipping through the dismal selection of early afternoon programming and decided it was better than silence and the cold, cruel voices that ring through my head whenever there is any lull in background noise. Only they’re not so much cold, cruel voices as a nearly complete silence broken only by the occasional soft thud as errant brain cells collide in a largely open field of play.
It turned out to be an O’Brien episode of Deep Space Nine, a rare pleasure indeed! So, of course, the power went out, just as I had broken into my third peanut. This happened at exactly 1:32 p.m. I know this because we have what I realize now is an unusually high number of battery operated clocks on the main floor of our house—five, one for each room on the floor (we make up for it by having zero on the second floor). This turned out to be great later in the week when watching the second hand slowly tick its way around its track became one of my favorite ways to pass the long, slow hours, and listening for the quarter hour chimes of the grandfather clock became something that I looked forward to with white noise deprived zeal as I tried to fall asleep every night.
After the power went out, I decided that it might be in my best interest to calmly and collectively assess my situation. I walked to the back window that looks out over our tree-filled back lot. It had been awhile since I’d checked to see how the ice was building, so I was mildly surprised to see that it was around a half inch thick on the branches of the trees.
“Huh,” I thought, because there wasn’t much more that could be thought on the subject.
If past power outages dictated, we’d have power before the afternoon was up and the house wouldn’t even have a chance to get properly chilled down.
I called Libby at work and let her know the situation. Wichita had only then started to see the first bits of freezing rain, but already things were starting to get ugly there too.
Here would be a good point for me to describe the typical Wichita driver. Every Wichita—and Kansas in general—driver will tell you that he or she is EXCELLENT in questionable conditions. I know this because I personally will tell you that I am an excellent driver in questionable conditions, and I know this to be a boldfaced lie. The truth is that, even though we see just about every kind of weather over the course of a calendar year, we don’t see MUCH of any of it. Thus, when it rains, drivers will tell you to your face that they normally drive like champs in bad weather right after they have side-swiped your car with twenty yards of steering/braking room to spare. And when that rain turns into snow or ice, forget about it. Odds are that 9 out of 10 drivers on the road at any given time are fleeing from or heading to an accident of some sort. So, even though I know I’m an excellent driver, I try my best to keep my car safely parked in our driveway whenever the weather turns bad.
And did I mention that I have a job that affords me that luxury? I’m sure I haven’t. I’m not one to gloat about those types of things (and everyone has to humor me on this bit because, really, what else do I have to gloat about?).
So, because Libby has a government job and it’s a well-known fact that when things turn south government employees are like rats on a sinking ship, she left work early and came home.
OK, that’s not fair. Government employees aren’t like rats at all. Not even the almost cute, domesticated rats that people keep as pets. They’re great people. All of them. But she did get to leave the rapidly deteriorating city that she worked for to come home and sit in the electricity-less house with me for the rest of that afternoon, so you come to your own conclusions.
And in that electricity-less house we sat for the rest of the day. As the last vestiges of heat slipped through our woefully inefficient windows, doors and walls, the two of use stood in our back room watching as tree branches fell with alarming frequency all over our property. It was so fascinating, in fact, that we stood there nearly all of the remaining hours of light that we had. We watched as huge tree bits fell on our nearly new shed (four separate times, actually) and as other trees all around our perimeter decided that our property was far superior to the property that the trees actually belonged to (for, while we have scads of trees around our place, we only have about a dozen or so that are actually on our property).
It was scary and awe-inspiring and devastating (and I’m sure I could get all kinds of poetic or at least spend a little time describing what it actually looked like, but I’ll leave those few thousand words to the pictures, this is already thousands of words long enough on its own) and it was all wrapped up into one rapidly chilling afternoon that turned into a very long night where every five or ten minutes the complete silence of our house would be broken by more trees falling, sometimes directly onto our house. And if you’ve never been woken out of a light slumber by the sound of a 1000 pound cottonwood branch crashing into your roof, I highly recommend it for the sheer adrenaline rush experience. After taking the time to get up, grab a flashlight, bundle up a little more and go outside to check what damage had been done a few dozen times, we slowly started to acclimate to the unknowable noises and drifted off into an uneasy sleep that ended up being one of the worst nights I’ve ever had. When we went to sleep that night, our house was still warm enough that our breath was only JUST starting to show up. By morning, the words we spoke actually froze in mid-air and dropped to the floor with an unceremonious thud. When I woke up that morning, my nostrils were completely filled with frozen snot and bits of my ears were flaking off to the touch. I had to use warm water to separate my butt cheeks. It was that cold.
Sadly, we don’t have a thermometer in our house. In fact, we only have one thermometer on our property, and it’s one that we bought last summer at the Ikea in Quebec and it’s outside under our back porch. It’s a nice looking thermometer. It’s roughly the size of a cinnamon roll. Not one of those poser rolls that they sell in tubes and you cook for a few minutes in a pie tin, one of those good-sized, Amish-style cinnamon rolls with the diameter of a tea saucer. It’s made of stainless steel and has a little temperature dial on the front. They came in a selection of three different options: thermometer, barometer and . . .something else, maybe kilometer or something that ends in –meter, I’m just sure. When we were looking them over, I noted (I think I said this to Libby, but I might have just been addressing my inner-child, as I often do with my observations that seem pointless enough not to share with the general public—and as you can see by the kind of crap I include in something like this, it would have to be MIGHTY pointless before I wouldn’t share it) that there were so few of the pedometers and barometers but so many of the thermometers. It turns out that there was a simple reason for this, the stupid thing only goes down to 30 degrees. Now, I’m not sure what genius was in charge of buying thermometers that only go down to 30 degrees in a country where the average winter temperature has to be measured in Kelvin just to keep people from getting depressed, but I hope he was fired, because even us suckers from Kansas who were stupid enough to buy one of the damn things found ourselves righteously disappointed by it.
The point is, we had no way of knowing how cold it was in our house. We don’t think it ever got much below freezing, because the snow we tracked in kept melting on the floors, but it was cold enough that water stopped evaporating on everything that got wet.
Hold on. I need to go turn up the heat. These memories are making the mental hypothermia set back in.
That’s better.
We eventually ran out of towels because every time we took a shower, the towel we used to dry ourselves became a frigid pile of damp uncomfortableness that never dried. Dishes that I hand washed three days before our electricity came on were still wet in spots when we finally got power back. I remember slipping on a puddle of nose drippings that I left within the first 24 hours of the outage. It sucked.
We were far luckier than many people, though. And I’ll take this moment to be serious. We have a gas water heater, so we were never without hot water to warm our hands or take a bath in. And our stove is gas so we were able to boil water for tea or cocoa or to fill nalgene bottles full of bowling water to warm the foot of our bed throughout the experience. And, after the first three miserable days, our friend Lecia loaned us two propane-powered catalytic heaters that we were able to use to warm our upstairs landing and our bedroom almost to the point where we couldn’t see our breath. Without those luxuries, I would have given up and started our house on fire for warmth. And, even then, after everything was said and done and we’d gotten our power back on and I reflected on how sorry I felt for myself and how miserable I had been for the past five days, I quickly realized that we had it REALLY easy, comparatively speaking, so I made sure to pop onto the internet as soon as the computer was running and donate some money to the Red Cross for the tsunami victims. Because, if it sucks to have bad weather in a civilized country where danger can usually be escaped by a quick jaunt down the street to a friend’s or even to Wal-Mart for a quick warm-up, imagine how hard it sucks having to deal with far more devastating conditions in a place where the only thing they know about Wal-Mart is that the company pays $.05 per day to sew shoes together.
But enough of that.
Some days passed like that. Five total, though I don’t really remember much specifically about those days. Libby, the lucky devil, was able to retreat to the sumptuous warmth of her fluorescently lighted cubicle. I, meanwhile, had to make like a refugee and travel from friend’s house to friend’s house, killing time until it got dark and cold enough that we wanted to be back in the house to make sure the pipes and our cats didn’t freeze. That Thursday night, our neighbor John came over and asked if we’d like to share the warmth of their fireplace for awhile.
To those of you who go out and meet your neighbors just as soon as you move into a new neighborhood, the fact that we had lived next door to John and Kim for three years but had done little more than make uncomfortable small talk over the fence in that time will seem strange, anti-social, and possibly one of the trappings of an insane mind. But we hadn’t, so label us however you want.
It turns out, though, that they are cool people. We went over there every night that weekend and, by the end of it, were enjoying their company enough that we split enough wine to make the whole, cold affair drift blissfully into the deep sleep of the hopelessly inebriated on Saturday night.
Saturday night, in fact, John and Kimberly got their power back. We would have gotten our power back too, if not for the accursed Elm tree in our front yard that severed our power line from the transformer on the corner (oh yeah, transformers exploding on a frosty, stormy night are also pretty neat to see—they flare up in many shades of green and orange). Elm trees, I’ve come to learn, are nature’s way of paying people back for making a muck of the planet over the past few millennia. They are about the most worthless tree on the face of the globe. They are tall enough to be dangerous and flimsy enough to guarantee that 75% of their total mass will collapse under the pressure of a hearty ice storm. But when we saw the electric guys working on the line in front of our house, our hearts were all aflutter. Well, mine was at least. Libby was butt-digging our little adventure. She was getting the chance to use bunches of camping materials that she had been stock-piling for god knows how many years—and she was getting to do it from the comfort of a real bed! The best of both worlds! Bah. I felt like a school-girl who was about to get her first real kiss. Or at least I assume that’s what I felt like. The best I could do from personal experience was a school boy who had just discovered boobs, but that somehow lacks charm and completely fails to create the right kind of romantic atmosphere for how I was feeling. Not that it was romantic, by any means (though we did drink a lot of wine that night, and it would be awfully cool to be able to tell a kid that he/she was conceived in the great ice storm of ’05—pronounce ought-five, of course, [though I have no idea how that’s spelled]), but it should probably have that same sort of romantic eagerness to it. A sort of longing for something that you’ve wanted so bad but were beginning to think would never happen. That kind of thing. You know. All of this could apply to the school boy discovery of boobies too, of course, but what can you do?
Anyway, now I don’t even really remember where I was in the story. Saturday. Power. Wine. Possible procreation. Sweet sweet boobies.
Right. Sunday.
Sunday came and with it came the hope of some warming up. Finally. Uncharacteristically warm it may have been the whole winter up to this point, but the first four days that we didn’t have power, it never once got above freezing—actually, it only got NEAR freezing once, the rest of the time it ranged from 1-20 degrees. We decided to make the most of it by getting all dressed up to start on the cleanup. John had come over for a few hours on Saturday to help us get some of the bigger stuff cut into moveable sizes, and on Sunday Lecia and Kris said they would come up and give us a hand cutting and moving some more of it.
So, while we procrastinated in our living room, hoping that it would get warm enough that we could venture outside and maybe open the windows to warm the house up a bit, the electric company trucks pulled in front of our house and within thirty minutes had our power up and running again. This was at around 10:30 a.m. I’m not sure of the exact time because I was dancing like a fairy princess all around the house and into the streets where I kept sweeping every passer-by into my intoxicating dance and before long we had an actual, impromptu, 40s musical-style production taking place on the streets of Newton. And then we cut branches for far too long and ended the day complaining how goddamn hot it was in our house even though the thermostat was only reading that it was in the upper 50s.
And that’s our story. Not quite as interesting as the one that happened in the movie Ice Storm—there certainly wasn’t any swinger parties and nobody got to see Christina Ricci naked that I know of, well, and nobody died—but it’s all I’ve got. I know there are other memorable things that I failed to work in, so I will list them here and you can just plug them into your memory wherever you see fit in this five day period:
- Making s’mores on our gas oven.
- Turning down numerous offers from fantastic friends and family to stay with them
because we’re just too stupid to get out of the cold.
- Worrying about our pathetic cats even though they were probably perfectly comfortable
the whole time. I mean, come on. They’re made of fat and fur, how much more built for
warmth could you possibly be?
- Discovering cold fusion and using it to power a rocket to launch a clown into space.
- Kicking up part of a tile in the kitchen because the glue had frozen underneath it.
- Running an extension cord from our neighbor’s house to power a space heater, flood
lamp and electric blanket for an evening.
- And, finally, learning, after years and years of hearing people talk about it but never
having real cause to learn its importance, the true value of dressing in layers.
I hope everyone has learned something important by all this. I know I haven’t.
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