Cold, Cold, Cold

Ice Storm 2007

Chapter 4

Tuesday, January 16, 2007. Freezing, teeth chattering cold. Last night was 6 degrees outside and 38 in the dinning room.

I got up in the pre-dawn hours, (not difficult when you go to bed at dark in a cold house). First order of business was to get the fire going and second, make some coffee for my Queen. I gave the dog some leftover soup; she looked hungry. I was out all day long again finding seasoned wood to burn. It snowed all day long, even during the moments when the sun peeked out of the clouds. I ran for the camera to snap a few pictures of the light on some spectacular ice sculptures. I’ve been feeding the birds copious amounts of black oil sunflower seeds three times a day each day. There’s a scripture about the lilies of the field and the birds of the air and God taking care of them; I know I’m not he, but it felt like I was his instrument in some minute way, taking care of his birds for those days.

Each day so far has been a struggle from before dawn to after dusk just to keep a little heat in the house to keep the water pipes and us from freezing.

This has been a form of my dream for all of my life, living and surviving an event greater than anyone’s ever seen. We have survived with minimal preparation, maximum hard work and a little ingenuity. I’ve ached every muscle and joint in my body, from the constant work and effort, yet I’ve felt great! I’ve thanked the Lord for such an adventure for an old man. This has been superb! I never had anything like it, no one has ever seen anything to match it; and best of all I had a wonderful woman here who met the challenge, as always. We celebrated our 43^rd wedding anniversary in a grand style with a wonderful adventure.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007. I woke up again to bitter cold (that was in the house) at 4:30 AM, but stayed in bed until first light. I emptied the ashes from the fireplace, (much easier in the light than in darkness); the fire had died out last night. The temperature was 34 degrees in the dinning room and was 29 in my computer room upstairs. There was no heat there at all and I kept the door shut so I had a model for worst-case conditions in the house. The 29 degrees frosted several house plants I had in there, but didn’t yet freeze some bottled water I had stored there, so I felt confident the pipes in the upstairs bath were still all right. The basement, oddly enough, was the warmest place in the house and I could feel a marked warming as I went down there. I understood that the earth temperature kept the basement at a pleasant 56 degrees, most of the year. There was a planter full of Impatiens down there by the north window that was beginning to bloom.

Joyce heard from the neighbor that there were power poles and lines down north of us, so we may have several more days without power. I made the two miles to Ash Grove today, for batteries, water, chain saw oil, bread and smokes for Joyce. I wasn’t so sure, but I think the smokes were higher on the priority for survival than the water, not for Joyce, but for me. She got cantankerous without cigarettes.

Ash Grove had trees down everywhere, but they had workers all over trimming trees and putting up power lines, showing me that we were way down at the bottom of the priority list.

I had been digging out wood from a ten-year-old woodpile, but I hit the bottom, so tomorrow I will have to do some exploration to find more aged wood and I know it’s encased in ice. I’ve been using a garden mattock to break loose wood from icy covers, making a problem trying to burn wood that has some high level of moisture left on it and in it. No matter how long it sat in the house, the wood still had ice on it.

I ran out of energy, the non-stop days of physical exertion keeping wood in the fireplace are getting to me. This has been the 4^th day in a row of daylight to dark hard work. I was a kid in the Navy and we normally worked 12 hours on, 12 hours off, 7 days a week during air operations, but that wasn’t as strenuous, or non-stop, and I was 40 years younger than now.

This picture below is a telephoto of the power line across the street on the second day of the storm.

The ice was thick on the line across the street. It didn’t break at my house, even though it was quite thick on the line; but it broke along with several utility poles down the road, cutting our power for 14 days.