Winter’s almost here again. Great. No, I mean that. Great. I don’t mind a salt shake of bad weather, as a rule. I’m a writer, for God’s sake. Cloudy days and rain on the roof give me inspiration. I find sunshine annoying, when I’m trying to create. And if there’s a soothing snowfall outside—whoa—look out. As I look through the window, I start having Tolstoyan daydreams of being huddled in at Yasnaya Polyana for the duration, with Anna K. just begging me to finish the damned sentence. Then my wife (a sun worshiper who despises gloomy weather) comes in and tells me to take out the garbage, and my Russian mind-bubble pops. But, as a rule, I find the more provocative, dark-and-stormy changes in weather a catalyst for creativity. For drifting into those world-and-word-building parallels of alternate reality; at least, until that fiery yellow real-world ball returns, messing it all up. So, winter’s coming. Great.
But then I remember the last winter and take pause. A long pause. Thinking, maybe not so great, after all. Let me explain.
We happen to live in an isolated area of the Texas Hill Country. Actually, in the middle of a working cattle ranch, remuda, and wildlife preserve: whitetail deer you’ve named and that pester you for carrot and apple treats; mouflon sheep that have head-crashing battles outside your office window; blackbuck antelope that, when they lose a horn, resemble fairytale unicorns drifting toward you across the fog-shrouded pastures; rafters of wild turkey strutting to and fro about like so many head-bobbing, suspicious-as-they-are-nosy neighbors; and, of course, the usual assemblage of coyote, fox (saw a vixen have her kits in a pocket of the stone wall outside aforementioned window), skunk, armadillo, panther (and, yes, they do sound like a woman screaming in the middle of the night), tarantula, scorpion, rattlesnake, and species as yet unidentified. You have to literally ford creeks, cross a single-lane earthen dam, and navigate the hilly-and-narrow tortuous ranch road should you suddenly experience a Big Mac attack at nine at night. The reason I mention this is to allude to the obvious fact that, when bad things happen, such as bad, bad, really bad weather, and when you choose to live in such a remote location, you can’t count on city services or block neighbors to come to your rescue. Isolation has its upside, of course. But when the downside comes, no one will hear you crying but you and whatever indifferent varmint happens to be passing by.
That was the situation when on Thursday the 11th of February, of this year of our Lord 2021 (the week before Mardi Gras), my wife happened to be watching the Weather Channel when I stepped in to the room, and she asked me, “What’s that blue circle of doom coming toward us on the weather map?” I looked at the television and saw that the entire country looked fine, everything was unusually and amazingly clear of any issues—except for the single, small blue circle approaching the Hill Country. “No idea,” I said, and went to refill my coffee cup.
As I recall, that night I was in the middle of some sort of dream about it already being spring, and I already being kayaked and fly-poled, drifting along in my nirvana state across the water’s mirror surface, when I woke up and heard what sounded like machine gun fire against the aluminum roof. Somehow I fell back asleep, and when I woke again, it was daybreak, and the machine gun fire was only then fading away. I was tired after mind-fishing and dodging gunfire all night and didn’t go outside till after the second cup. Then I opened the front door and saw what was there. The strange new world of ice…there. And not just a troubling sheen or thin, vexing layer of the stuff. The landscape was an inches thick block of ice, glittering with an artic-like beauty at first glance, and encased within an even bigger, more awe-inspiring world of total, frozen silence; a silence, for those who live among the variety noise of city, town, or tiniest country hamlet, can’t even imagine. That’s when I turned away, shutting back the door and went to scramble an egg and give the mess time to melt beneath the morning sun.
But it didn’t melt. Instead, as the sun stayed hidden somewhere behind its horizon to horizon canopy of dark gloom, the temperature throughout the day began to drop. And drop. And drop some more. “This is weird,” I told my wife at dinner. “First a major moisture dump followed by plunging temps. First the ice, then the frozen world to keep it there. I guess it’s our version of the perfect storm.” Of course, her glass was still half full, although evaporating rapidly. “It’ll be better tomorrow,” she said, “when the sun comes out. My sun. You’ll see.”
Then the next day was the same. The same frozen, silent world. “For Chrissake,” I complained again at dinner that night, “the rest of the country is doing fine. Why do we still have that little blue circle over us and everyone else is doing just fine?” But she only sat there, staring down into her empty hope glass, waiting for her sun.
The electricity went out on day three. Later, we heard something about the wind turbines freezing, and the cloud-covered solar panels pissing out their last kilowatt. It didn’t matter. When you’re in the middle of nowhere, and don’t even think about trying to drive the frozen nightmare obstacle course out of there, it didn’t matter. “How’s our firewood supply?” my wife asked. Well, we had the normal stack of oak, under shelter, for the normal, occasional, cheery fire, but not nearly enough for this. We had our main supply stacked out by the pasture, every piece now frozen together under several inches of ice. So while my wife kept the fire going, I took the sledgehammer and pick out to try smashing and picking apart our stacked ice palace, our only source of heat. We laid out these iron chunks of hope near the fireplace to dry, causing so much steam to rise I was afraid clouds would form and start raining. While this was going on I drug our portable generator out the ranch shop, cranked it up, and ran an extension cord through the kitchen window to plug in the refrigerator. “What are you doing?” my wife asked me. “Just open the damn door. It’s colder inside the house than inside the freezer.” I shrugged. “I guess I just needed to do something. To stay occupied.” And she shook her head. “Well, go pick free some more wood,” she said. “That’s better busywork than warming up our fridge.”
It was so cold, the fireplace heat only emanated out into the living room a few feet. Beyond that was the North Pole. So that evening we drug couch and chair inside the safe zone and spent the night wrapped in coats and blankets, afraid we would both fall asleep at the same time and the fire would go out. My wife’s two ankle-biters, Bella and Judy, loved it. Party time. Snuggled with mummy on the couch, treats at two a.m., and getting to watch me in my armchair with my head bobbing up and down in the firelight like a water-cork, fearful of sleep and the onset of hypothermia. To make matters worse, my wife had placed her bearded dragon’s glass enclosure front and center between me and the fireplace, blocking what little puff of vibrating molecules might drift my way. “Dammit, I’m cold,” I complained to her. “Well,” she said, “you know she’ll die if we don’t keep her warm enough. Go put on another coat.”
Our water well gave up its ghost on day four. Now, no electricity, no water. Not that we were taking that many showers in a fifteen-degree bathroom. Of course we had emergency drinking and cooking water, but toilets still needed flushing. So when I wasn’t hammering and picking away at the wooden ice palace, I was breaking the ice on our goldfish pond and bucketing water for sanitary necessities. That was also the night a firecracker pop exploded right before us, jarring my wife and me, the two dogs, and the lizard from our exhausted slumber. I looked and saw the floor tile before the fireplace had cracked and heaved up from the concrete floor beneath; evidently, from the temperature difference between the hot tile and frozen substrate. After that I sat there, watching the fire and hearing, for the first time, the loud, sickening cracking of massive tree limbs somewhere beyond, coated with their tons of ice, that just couldn’t take it anymore. And before it was over, a veritable forest of limbs and shattered tree trunks would litter the entire ranch.
By day five familiar faces began appearing at our front and side and rear gates. Of course the ranch was keeping the stock fed and sheltered as best they could, but the wildlife was left to itself, and to Mother Nature, who was acting in a frightening manner, it was obvious, none of these furry creatures understood. We always kept bags of corn and grain on hand to supplement the dry, sparse winter grass they survived on. But there was no grass now and you could already see them trying to gnaw the frozen bark off trees. We began to parse out the bag food as best we could, through day five, into day six and day seven, and on into day eight, when the power suddenly came back on at eight p.m. By daybreak of day nine we actually stared in disbelief as the sun rose over the frozen, glittering-diamond landscape and began to thaw things out. The Great Texas Ice Storm & Freeze of 2021 was over.
What we already knew but was now reinforced in spades was that anything, good or bad, could happen to anyone, or anything, at any time. We found one of my wife’s pet blackbucks, an old ram, lying frozen near our house. When we took it over to the ranch burn, where the dead carcasses were being placed, my wife said the old thing was probably standing there in the dark, knowing she would come to its rescue. She said she was sure, if she had only known, and gone to it, it would have followed her into the stable, lay down in the warming straw, and eaten its portion of grain and corn. She was sure of that.
Now another winter is coming. Again, I don’t mind the changing seasons. I’m a writer, after all. Life is a changing season. All you can do is prepare yourself as best you can and go into it. After that, it all belongs to the hands of fate, and whatever other miracle solutions you might be working at the moment.