When you are over fifty I think the shock value of things goes up. Like saying, "In all my fifty years, I've never seen this ever happen !" has a certain zing to it.
I got that chance a couple of weeks ago. Not fifty but twenty seven. That is the number of years I've lived here in the US, in Portland specifically and yeah, I've seen nothing like this ever! Then I spoke to my 79 year old neighbor and she said she hasn't seen anything like this in her entire life and just like that my protestation bombed out!
Anyway, the forecast did call for winds in the 40 mphs and temperature in the teens. But what was not accounted for was the heavy rain that preceded this event.That had loosened the roots of tall plants, which I learnt from this bitter experience, have fibrous roots, and the deep freeze hardened said roots and the wind gusts toppled them like dominoes.
We were all warm and cozy, making videos of the snow swirling around in the blowing wind thinking about the fact that it always deposited itself in our frontyard.
And just like that, the power went out.
Well, no biggie. They will work on it soon. Maybe when the storm abates, which should be by end of day? Right? Boy we didn't know then how wrong we were!
We hunkered down, ate lunch, huddled in front of the one working furnace in the house, and gradually, ever gradually the temperature in the house started falling. From the seventies to the forties is a long ride and by the time that happened,the chill was biting and we were in the dark, with candles nd flashlights guiding us from room to room. We became aware of how reliant we were on electricity. No microwave, no dishwasher, no refrigerator. Water and heat was not a problem, but still one felt handicapped by things that were no longer working as they should be. But we managed to cook dinner, eat it, dump all the plates in the sink and run off to bed. Bed, being three comforters put over the carpet in the living room, followed by pillows and multiple comforters and blankets for warmth. We were all lined up close to each other just to retain as much body heat as possible. The furnace was still running but it was no match for the rapidly falling temperatures that started to actually make us shiver. Dressed in socks and gloves and jackets in addition to pajamas, we still felt it.
A fitful sleep and come morning we woke up to bone chilling cold in the house. Brushing was torture, the water was very cold. We managed to brew coffee and drink it to warm ourselves. But it was no longer cozy in the house. Breakfast done, we became aware that this was not sustainable. If it were warmer, we'd make it. But with the temperature barely rising to about 20 degrees F, we knew that we'd have to do something. Vincent took a walk around the neighborhood and came back home convinced that power would not be restored anytime soon. He had seen firsthand, the destruction, but in hindsight, that was just a fraction of what it turned out to be. We decided to wait out the mess in a hotel room.
That part was not the difficult one. We managed to snag a room for two nights at a hotel and since there was yet another smaller ice storm forecast for Wednesday, we booked another room in another hotel, planning to come back home on Wednesday when the temperatures were expected to hit the forties by afternoon, melting away this whole mess. Power was restored Monday evening but we chose to stay out until Wednesday.
Wednesday came around and everything had been going according to plan and we packed up at the hotel and drove back home sighing in relief and anticipating a slide back into routine, when the first roadblock hit. The temperatures were still stuck below freezing at 1.00 o'clock in the afternoon and the Highlander couldn't make the slope up to our house. Damn!
We drove back into the neighborhood at the bottom of ours and parked the van which promptly started sliding in the ice. Vincent managed to somehow park it in a flat area without crashing into any of the vehicles on the street, and between the three of us, Vincent and Manny and myself, we slipped on tire socks around the front wheels. It involved clinging to the vehicle and sliding and slipping to the wheel, holding the rim and slowly settling yourself on your knees and slipping the sock in, and all this at below freezing temperatures. Have you tried putting on leggings one size too small for you? That would be a cakewalk considering the effort to make a tire sock wrap a tire. After spending a precious hour on the two socks, we finally drove up the slope to our house one more time, but nope! No go. The vehicle still couldn't make it up the icy slope. What now?
We skulked back to a Grocery store/ Deli where we could sit and figure out what to do. We kept tracking the temperature rise and at 4.00 o'clock, it was supposed to hit 34 degrees F and that might melt the ice enough for us to make it home.
So back we drove home and this time, it worked! Man!
Walking into a toasty warm house where the heater had been running and the lights were on ( because we had left them on before we left) was the happiest feeling on earth! The relief!
Little did we know that the worst was yet to come.
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