Friday, I had an afternoon appointment for a consultation in Annapolis, Maryland. The client was willing to pay a considerable amount extra for me to travel out there in person, and my fee included the two hours of driving it normally takes to get from my office in downtown Washington to Annapolis and back. On the whole, I figured it would be a pretty profitable way to spend the afternoon.
That consultation ran way overtime, too, making Friday even more profitable than I had anticipated. But getting back to DC from Annapolis Friday night proved quite problematic, indeed. A huge snow storm started about noon in Washington and by six o’clock Friday night, I was just leaving Annapolis when it arrived there.
I called a friend who lives out that way on my Blackberry, and he said sure, I could stop by his place and drive back to Washington after the snow storm. Well, anybody who follows the news broadcasts or surfs the Internet knows what happened next – while I was driving down Maryland Route 2 to Lower Marlboro, that snow storm turned into the Blizzard of 2010. Despite the fact that my imported sports car has all-wheel drive and I routinely laugh at snow, I barely made it up my friend’s driveway and into his garage.
Things were fairly cozy there, though, as my buddy has a large fireplace and four or five cords of well seasoned oak and hickory splits to put in it. But when the snow reached about two feet deep, we lost the cable connection, and the cable modem that goes with it, too. Shortly after that, I thought to try accessing my e-mail via my Blackberry and found that, apparently, all of the nearby cell towers had also ceased functioning. Then, as the snowfall topped three feet, the land line telephone and electricity went out.
So there we were – my friend, his wife and kids, and me, stranded at his large and lovely country home, forced to live, well, like the Amish up in Pennsylvania live all year around, and, in fact, have lived for centuries. Actually, despite walking through the house with candles and oil lamps when it got dark, and heating my friend’s home with a roaring blaze in the fireplace, we still had the use of a very nice propane gas range, flashlights, and three battery-powered radios, none of which I think one would find in any self-respecting Amish abode. What, I wondered, were the Amish making of the Great Blizzard of 2010? Not much, I surmized – certainly a lot less than the average person living between Philadelphia and Richmond was, to be sure. The radios brought us constant reports of woe as hundreds of thousands shivered in their pitch dark, numbingly frigid homes, which depend on fancy electrical gadgets like heat pumps and electronically controlled furnaces for warmth. Burning oak and hickory never smell so good as when they are keeping you from freezing to death, that’s for sure.
It would take days, we were told, for electricity to be restored in places like Rockville, Chevy Chase, Arlington, Alexandria and Silver Spring. These are communities right outside Washington, in some cases just over the District line, where the average citizen’s idea of coping with adversity is dealing with the Redskins having a bad season. One can only imagine the scene at some bureaucrat’s home in Potomac, where there’s no way for his kids to even watch television, much less play World of Warcraft or access Facebook, with hundreds of dollars worth of frozen food in the basement, threatening to quickly reach room temperature if PEPCO doesn’t come riding the rescue.
My buddy has a library, which is to say, a room in his house lined with bookshelves, upon which are stacked numerous actual, real books with paper pages. So any time not spent playing in the snow with their mom and dad found his children reading those books. This was rather extraordinary in my recent experience – I had reached the conclusion that American children have universally come to regard books as some kind of quaint, outmoded non-volatile storage medium of which dotty old people are sentimentally fond. But not this fellow’s children – his youngest told me that when she grows up, she – get this! – wants to write books. That’s just about as charming as can be, of course, but I do hope remarks like that don’t make it rough for her at school.
No doubt several million dollars worth of frozen and fresh food did spoil in suburban freezers and refrigerators across the region over the next two, three or four days. And now, for many, it appears that at least five days will elapse until electricity once again works its mysterious magic for beleaguered Washingtonians. The stench already emanating from the depths of their freezers and refrigerators is, I am sure, of such an overwhelming nature that it can only be described as indescribable. Unless, of course, they have, by now, tearfully thrown all their increasingly gamy steaks, soggy microwave dinners, slowly liquefying vegetables and such in the garbage, in which case, I sorely pity the poor devils who have to pick them up next week when the roads are clear and the temperature has returned to above freezing. I wonder how all those folks will feel when they hear what we did out in the sticks while snowed under in Lower Marlboro. Will they, perhaps, feel like a bunch of overpaid morons with meaningless Civil Service jobs? One can only hope. I would say, the fact that the vast majority of them couldn’t figure out how to keep their provender from rotting speaks volumes about the true worth of the typical federal employee.
My friend and his wife (and I, of course) simply unloaded the freezers, wrapped everything in water-tight plastic bags, and buried those bags in the snow outside. After that we got some more plastic bags – the one-gallon size – and filled about twenty of them with snow. Then we put those in the now-vacant freezer compartments and in the refrigerator spaces, distributing milk, cheese, butter, eggs, meats, vegetables and the like among them, achieving what amounted to several old-fashioned ice boxes. Sure, we had to pour off the water and put more snow in the plastic bags every twenty-four hours or so, but, under the circumstances, it’s not like we had all that many pressing duties.
This being a rural setting, my friend’s wife had a large galvanized steel country-style bathtub, manufactured circa 1920, that she bought for three dollars a couple of years ago at a farm auction in Bowens over by Route 231. She had been using it as a rustic display item which she would place on the front porch, stacking within it various pots of flowers during the summer months. We moved it into the kitchen and used it for its original intended purpose, obtaining all the hot water we needed from that propane range I mentioned.
Digging out, particularly getting the snow off the driveway, kept us busy after the blizzard subsided. My friend’s driveway is about five hundred feet long, and it took him and me nearly three hours to clear it with his snow blower. Fat lot of good that did us, though, because, unless we felt like trying to remove about four and a quarter miles of snow on the blacktop between the end of his driveway and Maryland Route 4, all we could do afterwards was wait for the snow plows. Aside from shoveling and blowing snow, though, it was mostly cooking (and consuming) large, delicious and hearty cold-weather meals, frolicking in the snow with the kids, playing chess and backgammon, sampling my hosts’ collection of top-shelf potables, and reclining comfortably by that crackling fire perusing the contents of his library until the lights came back on, which, for the record, was Tuesday morning at seventeen minutes past eight. Around ten, the snow plows finally reached the end of the driveway, and I bid my friend and his family goodbye. When I left, there was still no cable TV, telephone, cell phone service or Internet, but I suspect only I noticed.
It took me until two o’clock in the afternoon to get home to my place in Great Falls, Virginia. My house has a computer-controlled backup generator with enough fuel for ten days of normal operations, so everything was fine. Veronica was there, as were several of my neighbors, who, despite being able to afford to live in Great Falls, Virginia, had neglected to install computer-controlled backup generators in their houses. She had managed, I noticed, to get the attention of a fellow from down the street who’s the CEO of a defense contracting firm, and she was vamping it up for all she was worth, dollar signs glowing in her eyes. Not that he could see them – he wasn’t looking at her eyes, if you catch my drift.
The power came back on about an hour ago, I have been told, but the block party downstairs is still going strong. And there’s another huge snow storm bearing down on DC, scheduled to begin some time in the next twelve to eighteen hours. They’re predicting another ten to twenty inches on top of what’s already here.
Oh, well, at least Veronica fed Twinkle while I was trapped in Lower Marlboro – she hopped up onto my lap the moment I sat down to write this post and began to purr as if nothing unusual had happened at all. And, come to think of it, from her point of view, I guess nothing has.