The livelier posts are late. The fictive conversation guest posts I do for a commercial site are late. The review of an e-friend's hilarious book, Life Begins When the Kids Leave Home and the Dog Dies, is late. I've been busy opening the physical store, the Internet Portal, and this week the store's not even open due to fear that customers could be badly injured trying to cross the ice to get into it. Everything is late, if it's happening at all, because of this weekend's Big Wet Snow.
Despite the discomfort of celiac sprue I'm still young and perky enough to love a Big Wet Snow. If I didn't have writing jobs and a store to worry about I would have spent more time out on the road sawing up fallen trees to make the utility guys' job a bit easier for them. I love the way moving fast keeps my hands and feet warm enough to warm out soaked boots and mittens. (Yes, Nephews, your Auntie Pris is still a hottie--in the literal sense anyway.) I love the way even falling down in snow feels--hey, make an angel! I thoroughly enjoyed giving myself bronchitis, helping deal with a Big Wet Snow at seventeen, and I'd do it again. But I do have the writing and the store, so when my electricity went off at 6:30 on Sunday morning, I rushed down to town in search of Internet connections.
Those were hard to find. Living outside Gate City, I automatically assume that people in town will have electricity when I don't, or if they don't, people in Kingsport will do. This assumption is correct for most Big Wet Snows. This was one when it was not. People in some Kingsport neighborhoods actually lost their connections before I did. Gate City didn't even have traffic lights.
So it's officially time for our readers in Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Sweden, Scotland, Russia, the Ukraine, Canada, etc., to enjoy their annual chortle at what counts as a winter weather disaster in Virginia. We are so pathetic when we get a tiny glimpse of what a serious subarctic winter is like. Everything was shut down for the weather emergency when we had a little over a foot of snow and temperatures averaging right about the freezing point, with snow melting in the daytime and freezing at night.
But for us this really is bad. Driving in snow? Hello, this is Virginia. Walking in snow? I enjoy it, but most of my townsfolk are much older and sicker or at least lazier than I am.
My lights blinked, then went off and stayed off. I looked out the window. Everything was white, with a good bit of hedge collapsing into the porch under the first foot of snow that actually fell. Snow was falling in an almost aggressive way with huge flakes pouring straight down, except when gusts of wind drove them straight in under my umbrella. I fed the cats, put on boots, packed up some books to read and some knitting to do if unable to connect to the Internet, and left home.
Deciding that those of my slightly-elders who live west of me could look after themselves (without verifying this), I knocked on the door of the first one between me and town.
"I'm trying to get to the store just to use the computer, but I'm sure nobody's shopping. You?"
"I still have an Internet connection you can use. There is no electricity or Internet in Gate City. It gets worse past this block. I know because the next-door neighbor just called to say she was stuck in the snow and ask if I could bring her in from town. She's on an oxygen tank but I expect someone else can take her to the hospital. I am not driving in this!!!"
"I wouldn't either. I would never ask anyone to drive in this--it's a blizzard, when that wind picks up, a real live blinding blizzard."
This person is not closely related to me; one thing we did during a long frustrating afternoon was confirm that. My Drill Sergeant Dad would have been burning up the phone lines looking for somebody who could rescue an old sick neighbor like that. That cousin on whom people look down because he's divorced would have been, and in fact was, risking his truck on errands of mercy all week. Some people are just wired to feel responsible for helping others, and some are not. I got the gene from Dad. I don't have much more than that hyperthyroid enjoyment of working in snow to offer, but I'm wired to feel that I ought to have. It has been a source of pain to me not to be able to provide anything better than their closer relatives have to offer, to some of my slightly-elders.
I can offer the following thought. Several people in Scott County, Virginia, have snowmobiles, which they are not legally allowed to drive on the main roads in ordinary weather. They buy these things for the mere pleasure of roaring around past other people's homes and being a nuisance. They ought to be organized into a Snow Militia who could rescue old, sick people who are stranded in falling snow. My own closest neighbor, who didn't try to drive his truck home all weekend, would have enjoyed taking his Sno-Cat out to haul that old lady and her oxygen tank to a place where she would have been safe and warm. I've never owned a snowmobile, or wanted one, but if I'd had one I would have gone after her myself, even though she's not my elder, or neighbor, or even a close enough acquaintance that I had a mental picture of her beyond "older woman stranded in truck in snow."
Anyway I shared this person's Internet connection for a few hours during which it kept blinking in and out, and very little was accomplished. During this time, I later found time to confirm by checking my own footprints, almost all of that first foot of snow melted while another foot of snow continued pounding down. Then the Internet went out and stayed out. Then the lights did. I spent the evening knitting by the light of a bottled-gas fireplace and talking the slightly-elder through hours of acute boredom.
"I should go home now. I am not looking forward to it, but once I crawl in under my hand-knitted blankets and stop shivering I'll be all toastyboasty for as long as I can stand to lie in bed. What I can't stand is lying in bed with my head covered up when I'm awake."
"Don't go after dark! You don't know what the road's like by now. Why don't you stay tonight and I'll run you home in the morning."
On Monday the electricity came back and we listened to the reports of which neighborhoods were still frozen in the dark. In town one fast food place had lights and a crowd, while the other one was dark and closed for business. Several stores couldn't have opened if they'd wanted to because their electric-powered doors wouldn't work. I went home long enough to feed the cats, then set the Sickly Snail (that's the individual name of my worn-out Dell Inspiron) in front of slightly-elder's gas fire and was able to do some cyberchores, but not to open the templates for the paid posts.
On Tuesday I was able to set up my main computer in the cafe. The store is on the shady downhill side of Jackson Street, where it's protected from cars rolling into it by steep, sharp, step-like cement curbs. The snowplows had piled three-foot snowbergs over those curbs, and another storekeeper was in the cafe saying "Don't anybody open today! Somebody'd come in just to fall on that ice and sue you--or me!" I wrote a batch of paid posts and did the Glyphosate Awareness chat in the cafe. Chat was easier because very few people in the Eastern States were online.
By Tuesday afternoon my next-door neighbor's porch light snapped on, and I was supposed in theory to join a car pool, buy my groceries for the week, and go home and start the next batch of paid posts. In practice the car didn't show up. I marched briskly out to the grocery store. On the way I met that relative who'd spent the week, so far, running errands of mercy in his truck. He was sitting outside watching the temperature drop below the freezing point, cooling off between errands, looking old and tired, but having fun. He has put a lot of miles on that Toyota Tacoma, and made some expensive repairs to it, over the many years he's had it, but it's still running over rough roads, ice, floods, falling snow, whatever, and he visibly enjoys being the one his neighbors call in a weather emergency. That is how I know for sure we're related. He was waiting for a stranded motorist he'd taken to work to get off work so he could take that one home.
I saluted him, left the laptop computer in his custody, and marched on through the fast-freezing snowbergs, and if I was thinking "People who don't dare to share their cars in a Big Wet Snow should not be driving them" with every step on one foot, I was thinking "I could be picking up groceries for other people, too, if we still had land phones and they'd been able to call me," with every step on the other foot. My blood pressure was up in that wonderful zingy way it goes up during a "runner's high." Warm? Nephews, I was radiant. The cousin wasn't sure I'd get back to where we left the computer in three hours. I was back to collect it in less than two hours.
The hard part was getting groceries and computer up the private road. "They have lights, so I should have lights too," I kept telling myself while baggage kept trying to slide down my arms and drag me downhill on the ice. I saw a patch of bright light ahead! Fifty more yards to my own warm office room with the Comfort Zone heater on its stand right beside the cot that serves as either workbench or bed. (Slip. Craaamp. Pause to rest.) Thirty yards more--likely even Serena could bring herself to snuggle up on my knee, chomping my arm in a friendly way. (Cramp. Pause to rest.) Twenty yards (cramp), ten (cramp, slide)...
That was not my light shining out the window, after all. That was the moonlight reflecting on the snow still weighing down the hedge.
As I pushed my way through bits of hedge that had broken down since Monday's visit home, I will confess, because confession is good for the soul, that I yelled some un-auntly words at the cats, on the general topic of keeping the bleep out from under my feet in this bleeping-blanking snow and bleepingwell waiting for their blanking dinner...
"Dinner? Yes! Dinner! Now now now!" squealed Traveller, running underfoot. Traveller is a natural-born pet, but not a Listening Pet. Anyone who wants to adopt that rare freak of nature, a lovable tomcat, should be prepared either to kick his little shins a lot harder than I've ever been able to do, or spend a lot of time stepping on him or falling over him. Samantha and Serena are intelligent cats who recognized un-auntly words as an indication that they should keep out of the way. They went back to the porch and waited, but I both stepped on Traveller and stumbled over him while crossing the yard.
No lights. No heat. No reason to bring the computer home except to test its ability to survive being frozen overnight. Slowing down enough to change boots for slippers made me suddenly feel cold and tired, with my blood pressure still up, but now in a bad way. I forced myself to feed the cats. I did not force myself to stuff my leather boots, which froze overnight and could not be stuffed in the morning and will probably fit a size 5 foot when they do dry out. I did not even force myself to clear the working documents off the cot. I spread a sheet and a stack of blankets over it and burrowed in for the night.
For the next hour or so my life was very unpleasant, as my legs kept cramping and my pulse and blood pressure stayed high and I wondered whether I was well insulated enough to sleep in a freezing-cold office after all. After shivering for forty minutes I even called the emergency medical service to ask if they could take me somewhere warm for the night.
"We've been taking people to [a certain] shelter in Kingsport."
"Kingsport? How are they getting back?"
"We have no information about that. Nobody else we've taken there is going to work in Gate City in the morning."
"Are a lot of people already there?"
"They're packing them in, so far."
I thought about spending a night packed in with old sick patients, like waiting in a hospital emergency room with a patient only moreso, and decided that I'd rather freeze in my own home than die from the sort of infection I'd be likely to get from a patient in a shelter where people were packed in. Anyway I could always put my coat and boots on again, and maybe the Blanket Shawl, and walk briskly until morning; maybe stomp around in the yard and burn some garbage. Once again, plans set up for a class of full-time professional "needers" have nothing to offer an active adult in a crisis.
Around the time I decided that, if I was going to freeze, that'd be the way I'd prefer to go, I warmed up enough to get to sleep. I hadn't slept well in slightly-elder's overheated house. For one thing a TV set to a movie channel had come on during the night, and I've never formed the habit of sleeping through what sound like people calling for help, even if they were only long-dead actors in a movie made before we were born. Once I got to sleep I slept for nine hours and woke up feeling sweaty enough to want a nice cool shower, which, of course, was still a non-option.
The view as I walked out was unsettling. Not just the little crumpled lumps of ice that had been my soaked suede boots--I still had the Neoprene pair, thank goodness, and I've had the suede ones longer than real leather boots can reasonably be expected to work for one person. Neoprene boots are wonderful things, however strange they smell. They shrink to a snug fit when cold, then start reflecting bodywarmth back to you in seconds, and then expand for ventilation. The view got worse after I'd walked out in the Neoprene boots.
I met the utility guys on the way into town--young, well insulated men in a truck, sipping coffee and making notes for their own status updates. "My lights are still off," I told them, "probably because there are cables lying across the road and along the creek almost all the way from that house to mine. Also at least one snow-covered log that looks smooth enough to be one of your poles is lying across the creek."
"We saw that yesterday," one of them mumbled, with his insulated hat amplifying the sound of his voice in his own ears.
"And a couple trees across the road," another one said, pointing up the other road that forks off from mine, and so exposing his notepad.
I looked at his notes. They showed the name of a hospital. Who had come to this neighborhood after taking a call from a hospital? Someone up the other road was going to the hospital. Not the one with the excellent cardiac unit; the generic one where people with random injuries and infections go.
I saluted the guys. They are in for a long day of hard work and I don't feel optimistic about getting my lights on tonight either. But they're young men, built to enjoy a long day of hard work. I would rather have been floundering around in their boots, today, than trying to thaw out my brain in front of the computer in my own (actually I pulled off the boots and put on sandals in the cafe).
Marching briskly toward town, realizing for the first time that after age fifty you really don't get all of your energy back after just one good night's sleep, I passed the home of the neighbor who was supposed to have gone to the grocery store. His truck was there; not a mark on it. The roads between his house and the store had been thoroughly scraped and salted. The snow in his driveway looked as if he hadn't gone anywhere last night. I said to myself, "Hmph," and was about to keep walking, but...no lights were on in his house. Because of daylight, or because he was ill or injured? I stomped up onto the porch and banged on his door. I saw a human-sized shadow moving inside the house and started to walk away, then thought that if I'd interrupted an old man's favorite TV show I ought at least to wait long enough to yell "Just checking that you were all right" around his door.
Instead the old man said "Come in and sit down; I'll drive you into town," and I felt cold and tired enough that that sounded good. Before and during the drive I saw a few other slightly-elders driving past, obviously surviving this great and terrible taste of what much of the world has to deal with all winter.
Not to go into any personal details...the old man mentioned three or four other people, including a close relative of his, that he'd refused to help during the evening. He'd waited for me to call, he said, before going out on his own errands, which he'd be doing now. (I'd called him twice. As usual during any weather emergency, the primary function of new electronic technology is to break down.) Anyway he would have been able to help those people before, after, or during the trip to the store, but he had to take care of himself first, he said, and what he'd felt like doing was catching up on his Internet, TV watching, napping, and computer games, after the blackout.
"They'll find you frozen to death up there on the hill some day," he warned. "Look at that man over there; they're giving him a nice warm place to stay in the retirement project."
"That project already had rats and roaches thirty years ago, and now it has bedbugs," I said. "I'd rather freeze in my own home." I did not tell him that I'd seriously wondered whether I was going to.
"Well, I worked for years to take care of my children, and now other people can take care of me."
I don't know the genealogy, but he has the same general kind of face and is about the same age as the cousin I'd passed while walking to the store. He probably shares a fair bit of my DNA but I'm not sure he really is a relative. Well, to be fair, his truck is no Toyota Tacoma. In any case the contrast between the two faces was striking. Both men are biracial but look White, with blue-grey eyes and white beards. Both are handsome, if you look past greying hair and thinning skin. (Neither one is too old to catch the eyes of women who aren't already related to them.) Both are living with similar degrees of not-yet-disabling cardiovascular disease. The one who'd been thinking about others as well as himself looked as jolly as a slimmed-down Santa Claus. The one who was putting himself first looked terrible. You could have seen them down the block and known which one was feeling fine and which one was feeling old-and-sick.
Try a little public spirit, neighbor, I (didn't properly finish saying during this short conversation). Even if you do overdo the output of physical energy while fending for yourself and any other people you might be able to help in any way, public spirit feels good...ever so much better than lolling around being a taker.
I don't know whether I'll have electricity tonight. I don't know whether I'll get any offers to spend the night with anyone who has, or borrow a Coleman heater or a generator. (I don't know whether I'd dare to use either one.) I do know that if not invited to spend the night in a nice clean sitting room, and not able to spend it basking in front of a little electric fire, I'll spend it under that stack of blankets. And I'll probably be warmer, and certainly feel better in every other way, than that poor old fellow in the housing project, or even the one who's taking care of himself first in that house where his immediate family leave him alone.
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