I know better than to gripe about the blizzard of 2013. I was fine.
I lost power and therefore heat. I lost phone, TV, and internet, but I
had gas hot water and stovetop. (The
oven is gas as well, but it requires electronics to turn it on.) I’ve talked to
a guy who lost power to his electric well pump and had to carry buckets of
water from a nearby pond to flush his toilet.
Presumably he had to break the ice to dip it out.
I could even shower,
and if I ran the water for a few minutes before I started, I could warm the
bathroom up enough so I could actually take my clothes. I had a fireplace and
plenty of wood. I had a battery powered
L. L. Bean LED lantern and an LED book light so I could read after dark. I had
a cell phone that could be charged in my car. I was glad I prefer down
comforters to electric blankets.
In 1978 I was in a plane taxiing toward a runway in Mexico when
the pilot announced that there was a blizzard, and airports were closed up and
down the east coast, but he could get us to Atlanta. I wanted to yell, “Let me out.” It was lovely in Mexico, and it turned out to
be cold and boring in Atlanta. Still I
was lucky. I got there early enough so
there were still hotel rooms so my family didn’t have to sleep in the
airport.
I grumbled that I was missing all the fun at home. In those days a storm was an adventure. I see that same attitude in younger people
now. The young man who brought the water
in from the pond surely got cold hands and feet, but he liked telling the
story.
In times like this you learn what you can do without. We were a week without television. This
morning I turned on the TV to catch the weather report and ended up wasting 45
minutes learning things I didn’t need to know.
Ten minutes after the phone was restored, I hurried to answer it, and a
telemarketer tried to offer me a business proposition.
Lugging wood and being cold made me tired. The temperature inside my house was 40° and
went down to 35° on the third day. My
mind seemed sluggish. Sometimes that
which does not kill you weakens you, and sometimes it makes you strong. That hammock on a tropical isle that I
fanaticized about might not be as strengthening as a New England Winter. My survival of the storm doesn’t make as good
a story as dipping buckets of water out of an ice-covered pond, but I look on
it as an achievement a little more romantic than fighting the winter traffic on
the Gulf Coast of Florida.
