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Mary's Farm: The Ice Storm
Living without power
by Edie Clark
SLIDE SHOW: Ice Storm Photos
At one o'clock in the morning on December 12, 2008, I woke to a still darkness and the instinctual knowledge that the power was out. I stoked the stove and returned to bed. In the morning, still dark, I lit candles and brought my hand-cranked radio down off the shelf. The radio reported that 400,000 New Hampshire households were without power, virtually the entire state.
A power company official used the apt analogy of a tree to relay the news of when we could expect our power to be restored: "There's the trunk, the branches, the limbs, and then the twigs. If you live in an outlying area, you're a twig." I knew it would be a long wait.
Morning light revealed my car, every tree, every branch, every blade of grass imprisoned in ice. Icicles hung from branches and power lines like prisms from a chandelier. The power and phone lines that connected my house to the utility pole on the road lay on the ground across my driveway.
I pulled on my ice creepers and set forth across the newly Arctic landscape, everything coated in ice-white. I traveled about on my tundra, every step resounding, careful to avoid the wooded areas, where trees were falling, the sound of gunshots filling the air.
It was a completely new world. Trees bowed, trees broken. Limbs lay about as if felled by a tornado. On the icy sheath I crept out onto the road. I could see tree after tree lying in the way. I was completely cut off. From where I stood, it looked like Armageddon.
For two days, I sat at my kitchen table and watched out the big window that faces the mountain. Rain hammered the house, but the temperature stayed at 30 degrees. Every 10 minutes or so, a branch or a tree snapped, giving that dreaded sharp crack, and then shattering on the ground like broken glass on a concrete floor. I felt like a captain on the bridge of a ship keeping watch in a big storm. Visibility was poor, navigation pointless.
On the second evening, the rain ended and a full moon rose, lighting up the crystalline world like a stage set for Fantasia. I strapped on my ice cleats and walked out into the welcome, almost blinding, light. The shortest day of the year was only a week away, and the darkness brought on by the storm had felt punitive. The beauty of this ice-covered world seemed magical, suspending reality.
Driving was a unique experience, slaloming around felled trees, broken telephone poles, and downed wires. The tops of many trees had snapped off, leaving naked trunks standing like so many raised swords in the forest. Some had broken in two like twigs. Enormous splinters stabbed the ground like javelins thrown. Of all weather phenomena, ice is the most serenely destructive. No shrill wind, no thunder or lightning or shuddering of the earth. Just silence, but for the piercing reports of the breaking trees.
On the main highway, I saw a tractor trailer parked by the side of the road, its driver selling generators out of the back like a street vendor. When I reached the town of Peterborough, I found what looked like an abandoned village--stores dark, few cars parked on the street.
It turned out that some stores were open and customers could come in, using flashlights to scan the aisles and cash to purchase their items. At the post office, workers sorted mail in their heavy coats by the light of big flashlights. The impression of End Times continued.
Reader Comments
Comment from Sheila Burns on November 17, 2009
Such a good story, the reality of the description was wonderful. Here in West Virginia, we have had a a few of these ice/snow storms and I remember so much of this story that happened to us. Thank you.
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