Blizzard

Yesterday morning we awoke to a blizzard. Wet snow had been falling for hours and was still coming. In addition to piling up on the ground (about 9 inches so far), it had been sticking to the trees in a big way. I went out to make a start on shoveling the driveway and sidewalk, but I soon became more interested in all the fallen branches. As I wandered around dragging big pine boughs to more suitable locations, from time to time a sharp crack high up in the trees would get my attention, and I'd look up anxiously to make sure that the next big one was not actually going to land on my head.

Then I saw the dangling wires. They were still attached to the pole across the street, and they were still attached to our house, but they had gone slack: they were hanging so low that any person passing by on the sidewalk would have to duck, and any large vehicle on the street would have to keep to the other side. In fact, as a single swerving lane of cleared roadway showed, the last snowplow to go by had had to make its way past multiple obstacles: besides our wire situation, there was a big fragment of pine tree lying on the far half of the street diagonally across from us. It was clear that the wire had been dragged down by something (probably a big branch, but I couldn't identify one as the culprit), and that the added weight had caused a three-foot-long piece of trim to break off the house. The broken board was hanging from the wires, within my reach. I didn't want to risk electrocution, but I could see that the higher-up wire that brings power to the house was unaffected. Summoning up some courage, I tugged at the piece of wood, but to no effect.

I knew that the house had power -- or at least that it had had it a while ago. I went indoors to see if we also had phone and internet. Somewhat amazingly, we did. I called the electric company. They were very polite, but when I admitted that we still had power they of course put our address on a low-priority list for repairs. Tesi then called the company that provides phone and internet service, not to mention cable TV. They said they could probably come in three days. She also called the local police, just to let them know about the wires. Meanwhile I laboriously maneuvered the giant piece of tree out of the street, and then went back to shoveling.

Pretty soon three jovial firefighters pulled up in a big red truck. They looked around and asked me a question or two, and then their leader admitted, with some show of sympathy, that they were going to have to cut the wires. I registered incredulity and disappointment, but kept it light. These guys are just doing their job, right? Out came the big shears and the big rubber gloves, and bang: no telephone, no internet, no TV. When the guy asked for our house address for the third time, for their records -- he kept forgetting the number -- I said "Maybe I should phone it in. No, wait, my phone doesn't work!" in my best mock-angry manner. He replied that we'd be all right with no phone as long as we had a supply of booze. In hindsight we almost wished that we had somehow temporarily propped up the wires to get them out of the way for the time being.

The rest of the day was mostly tame. I shoveled, I rested, I shoveled, I rested, and eventually Asa woke up and helped me finish the job. The only really exciting moment was when Tesi and Amadi, headed to a neighbors house, just missed being clobbered by one of the larger fallen pine chunks. It could have been really bad.

(Here the story gets a bit anticlimactic. We have cell phones, of course, and electricity to charge them with. We even have internet; Tesi discovered a neighbor who has a home wireless network that we can tap in to from here, and who is willing to share her password in the emergency. We just have to go to a certain corner of the house to do it. Total snow on the ground was only about 14 inches.)