“We knew there’d be some ice. We had no idea the magnitude of what that ice was gonna cause.”
- Perry Plummer, New Hampshire’s Director of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, on the 2008 ice storm.
Day 1
You step out. Two inches of ice on everything. Your crouched movement mimics someone trying not to be seen. You are struck by how constant the rifle cracks are of limbs snapping off close by, and when the first pine tree detonates, implodes under its own weight, you look skyward. The cloud formations are flying by non-stop. You’ve never seen them this low.
You’ll learn the swath was a hundred miles wide when it came ashore as rain in Rhode Island and the changeover began as it climbed in elevation, following the Appalachian chain up through the Black Hills into the Green Mountains and then arcing easterly across the Presidential Range before crashing into the Gulf of Maine. You got it the worst in the foothills of the Whites.
Your dad was told in the pre-dawn briefing it would be a day not to forget. It hit him when he stepped out and saw the squadrons stretching from one side of the sky to the other. He was supposed to drop their payload in the Channel if flying home on a wing and a prayer, but the bomb doors didn’t open on D-Day. The secret of his Purple Heart wasn’t slinging a buddy over his shoulder and being blown into the hedgerow, but the shrapnel they had to leave in his ass.
The farmer next door knows you don’t know where your crawl space is and tells you to just hold the flashlight as he disappears like the first one into the tunnel in The Great Escape. You’ll learn the connection he made could have easily electrocuted him and will later see the power he restored as the power we’ve lost to life on the grid.
Red, yellow, and orange extension cords radiate from the generator like rays of the sun on a California Dreamin’ T-shirt you wore down to its threads. The farmer says it’ll only last a couple days. Later he tells you there’s less diesel than he thought. Tonight might be it. He doesn’t tell you what to spend your half-day ration on, but it takes less than half a day of melting snow on the woodstove to know it’s not tea. It’s the toilet.
Day 2
The sunset of extension cords is retracted at daybreak. The logo-less white T-shirt you wore to bed stays on. Already it feels like it looks, a flag being flown in surrender.
Wheelbarrowing six 5-gallon buckets of water up from the stream, you focus on what’s in front of you, what you know of water; its weight, its weight being heavier when it’s cold, your weight being mostly water, your thoughts being weightier when you’re cold. You watch the water sloosh out of the buckets. You don’t know why the level across each is exactly the same by the time you reach the house, but you stay focused on what you know and carry the buckets inside.
Day 3
The word from the ex-army guy is not to listen to them. The hill is passable. Parts of the downtown are back on. You follow his unsaid order to evacuate the women and children to friends and family. You approach the downed poles and sagging lines like a math problem. Should speed be the variable or the constant as you zigzag along the equation trying to solve for X — the pole to snap next? Before you left California, you asked a friend why he was switching majors in his senior year from Wildlife Management to Trigonometry and he wasn’t high when he said it was the same reason I kept taking Creative Writing for my electives… the Unknown’s got words, man, and the Unknown’s got numbers.
Day 4
It doesn’t matter when or where you heard, War makes the sane insane and the insane sane, and it doesn’t matter if the ex-army guy is easily triggered. He can be trusted in times of war. His civilian Jeep slides within feet of the wheelbarrow. He sees the water still splashing in the buckets and then looks at you like you’re insane. He orders you to drop a block of wood in each bucket and then drops the f-bomb after asking if I’ve been beyond Dudley Pond. It’s a fucking warzone. Poor bastards will be the last to go. Heard anything? Forget it, got to get back before dark. Don’t got a good feeling about tonight. Pipes could split and we won’t know ‘til the power’s back. Be like those bodies bleeding out when they thawed in Korea. Bet you didn’t know it got this cold there, but why would you. And off goes the ex-army guy.
Day 5
Word is the local cops took down the checkpoint at the on-ramp but the gas station doesn’t have diesel and the hardware store is down to triple-A batteries and tea lights. Ex-army guy assures us he’s talked to the owner and it won’t happen again.
You heat enough water in the sink for a French bath. You talk in code on your first day back to work. You’ve cut-off use of the word, power. You’re without if asked and most still are. All without have gone within. They offer us free coffee in the café at break and you stand with others imagining a war room of dark blue windbreakers with big white letters FED across the back standing amongst state-elected officials in polar fleece vests over button-down shirts and reps from public utilities dressed like your average GI Joe. You imagine them around a blown-up topo map of the state pushing cardboard cut-outs of trucks as if playing with their Matchbox toys again in a sandbox.
The ones who’ve been within the longest don’t leave when break is over. We debate who decides what is an act of God, who’ll be next for the word we refuse to say, and how fair it is that houses at the end of a street don’t go with their neighbors at the top. You ask if it’s fair hillsides suffer for the downtown and there’s silence. And then, like the mastermind in The Great Escape who loses his sight, someone who usually eats at their desk says it feels like the ice has her trapped and it’s getting harder to find an air hole. You looked around to see if anyone walked in and heard her before you head back to your desk.
Batteries dead, down to tea candles around the woodstove, you write, There are many levels to what could be said, but in the end, won’t they be saying the same thing the water did in the buckets?
Day 6
The blocks of wood worked. Later you’ll understand why.
You seldom remember dreams, but last night you dreamt of a light refracting off paintings on the walls and splintering through the glassy pine boughs outside, and it was followed by silhouettes of men in what might have been flight suits standing in what might have been the open bed an army truck rolling slowly past the front of the house.
Day 7
It wasn’t a dream. A convoy of utility trucks with different-colored license plates parades down the dirt road and only stops because your wheelbarrow is blocking their way. You scramble for foot holes in the icy embankment as if scaling the rubble of a bombed-out building and run a hand through your long hair which has matted to a ponytail. You feel giddy as a French girl before a jeep of GIs. You wish your handshake could convey a kiss to both cheeks. You want to say, Merci, to these scruffy liberators in protective suits and rings beneath their eyes as big as goggles.
There are more with than without now at work and the last without are forced further underground. Less is said at break. It’s easier to be overheard. The coffee is no longer free when the call comes. You speak softly into the other end as if a traitor now of La Resistance to life on the grid.
7 Days Later
Walking past the stream with your kids, you pretend not to notice the plastic pitcher left on the seventh day. It’s yellowed from the hard water. You pick up the pace so they don’t see the dirty secret of what you did to survive the occupation of ice. Going within yourself was like going to war. Later you’ll learn the French have a word for the feeling you’re left with and how it’s mostly said amongst themselves because the sanity of becoming a stranger to yourself doesn’t translate well.
Joshua Winant writes from a dirt road in the foothills of New Hampshire.
