TERRE HAUTE —
The picture window of my cabin is sealed in a perfect glaze of ice as I write this, last Thursday morning, and since it faces due north and sees little direct sunlight, I imagine I will be looking through this shower door glass of mine for a few more days. But since I sit and watch the woods much of the time, instead of writing, I suppose the ice is serving a rare good purpose in keeping me on task.
I’m afraid I am going to have to leave much to the sun in the next few weeks, hoping that it soon melts away the hockey rink of a driveway I have. I have spent much of this day — another away from school — out and about in the cold, but strangely content. We made it through the ice and the snow and the wind of last week with relative ease, and it was just so nice to see the blue sky and the dripping eaves and the light playing with the ice today that I am forgetting about grumbling for a while about the winter weather.
I have no hard luck story to tell about pain and suffering during the big storm. We did lose power at our place for a good while, but we had our fireplace to huddle around, and water and blankets and food to pull us through.
It is ironic, however, that we leave much of what we learn to such traumas. One of those lessons reinforced to me was that we are a citizenry that has come to accept our creature comforts as rights instead of luxuries. I stand guilty of that.
It was no mystery, this storm, this creature that was spawned by mixing cold fronts and warm air and moisture, was coming after us. We knew of its brewing days before its arrival here, yet, like most other folks, I imagine, I waited until the first icy raindrops were falling before I headed out after work last Monday afternoon to make sure my truck’s gas tank was full and that we had extra milk in the house.
Besides the rain, there was a panic in the air as I loaded my supplies into a grocery cart at a local store, a bit miffed that I hadn’t gotten there sooner to snatch up a few extra canisters of propane for my lantern, perhaps an extra can for the kerosene my salamander heater burns, although I hoped I wouldn’t have to run it. I saw a few folks literally raking the contents of shelves into their carts with little regard as to what was on them. Batteries to bread, salt crystals to soup, the place was pillaged.
As I drove home, the ice already clinging to my windshield wipers, I was worried a bit about the tree limbs that hang over my house; I had meant once again to get those trimmed last summer. Now, I could almost hear them crashing down on my roof, driving gaping holes through the shingles into my attic or tearing my new gutters from the eaves. I was thinking about what a thin shell we all have between us and the elements as I tucked my truck under our barn’s overhang, almost certain that the storm, in all probability, would not be as bad as everyone thought it would be. I was wrong.
That evening, as freezing rain pelted us, I padded around the house, glancing through windows, first into the back yard, then to the south toward the barn, and at other times to the west, fidgety, restless. I brought in wood for our fireplace, just in case, and spent considerable time filling our oil lamps, antiques that still have the most practical of purposes. I moved the family wagon to the barn, too, and saw to it that our outdoor cats — both claimed and transient — had straw in their boxes. I noticed that the rain had given way to pellets of a hard sleet, and that they weren’t sticking to anything; that was a good thing, I told myself. I made one last trip out the door to get my camping stove and noticed that it was like walking on pure white, large-grained sand. Until 10 o’clock, until the minute that our lights flickered, then died, I was pretty sure that we’d luck out.
It was just us — my wife, Joanie, and me — in the house that night. We will soon have to get used to not having anyone else there with us, and since we had our supper in us and our baths taken, we decided to sit by the fireplace to read until the power surged back to us. The dry old sycamore and maple logs I had lit were popping and cracking a pleasant tune, but I began to wonder, particularly when we heard the rain begin again and the wind to howl, if it was going to be so pleasant after all. Eventually, we shut off our bedrooms, and she headed to the couch. I laid down near the fireplace to keep the fire tended. The house cooled and clicked and creaked.
I slept miserably, constantly aware I needed to feed the fire. By 4 a.m., the house had cooled into the 50s. My nose was cold, and I rolled into a ball, and waited for the morning’s first light. I awoke at 6:30 when I heard the beeps of the microwave and dishwasher and computer modem as they came to life. I jumped up to adjust the thermostat, shut the fireplace doors, turned off a few stray lights, and headed off to bed, where Joanie had gone a few hours before after the sofa had put a kink in her back.
As I sipped coffee and looked out a back window into our crystal woods at 10 later that morning, the power died again. It would be off for another 8 hours. We recommitted ourselves to books and crosswords and casual conversation. My buddy, Joe, who also had no power, called to see if we needed anything; my brother-in-law, Phil, who did have electricity, did the same. My son came home and headed back out to get gasoline for his future father-in-law’s generator. We had our cell phones, but we saved their battery power since an old rotary telephone we keep worked. With it, we kept in touch with relatives and friends, many of them in the same icy boat in which we were afloat.
News reports began to come into our news center: The power wouldn’t be restored until midnight … until the next day at noon … until the day after that in the afternoon.
We were aware that it was to drop to near zero that night, and again, I pictured bursting water lines and fractured roofs and began to worry. At best, since I wouldn’t leave the house unless I just had to, I imagined hours of silence and cold. The house had cooled back into the mid-50s yet again, when as we had just finished a can of stew cooked on that camping stove by lamplight, the lights came on.
It is ironic that while we sat near our fireplace without the companionship of a television or computer last week that I finished reading Bill Bryson’s “At Home.” It is a wonderful book about the development of the house over the centuries. In the closing chapter, not long before our home came to life with lights and sounds and the breezes of furnace heat, I read this passage:
“One of the things not visible from our rooftop is how much energy and other inputs we require now to provide us with the ease and convenience that we have all come to expect in our lives. It’s a lot — a shocking amount. Of the total energy produced on the Earth since the Industrial Revolution began, half has been consumed in just the last twenty years. Disproportionately, it was consumed by us in the rich world; we are an exceedingly privileged fraction.”
Bryson is right. We are fortunate, and we know deep down that we need to take better care of what we have, because someday, when our lights go off, they might not come on again.
Mike Lunsford can be reached by e-mail at hickory913@aol.com or by writing to him c/o The Tribune-Star, P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808. Read more of Mike’s stories at tribstar.com/mike_lunsford, and visit his website at www.mikelunsford.com. He is currently working on his third book.
Mike Lunsford
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Tribune-Star columnist Mike Lunsford
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THE OFF SEASON: Lessons learned from the night the ice fell
- Mike Lunsford
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A walk in the woods
I went for a walk in the woods one day last week after work. It was a warm and green afternoon, and a fresh blue breeze blew in from the west like a new spring friend.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: ‘Dowsers’ provide hope more than science
My grandfather was a man of God. Many times I saw him, his right hand held high in the air at his Wednesday night “prayer meeting,” praising the Lord before weeping at the altar on his knees. And yet, he was a “dowser,” a “diviner,” a “witcher” who, as a favor, would grab a forked sassafras stick and find water for some poor unfortunate whose well had gone dry.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: As of today, it’s unofficially spring
Despite the calendar telling us not to rush things, I think it is all right to go ahead and say spring is here. The Ides of March has passed, Easter is coming soon, and I have already been out in my yard with a rake, getting my boots muddy. It looks like spring to me.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Twain’s Sawyer helps us yearn for ‘wilderness of childhood’
My cousin, Roger, stopped in one day last summer for a glass of tea and a little conversation. Rog has lived an hour’s drive away for years and now, and besides summer reunions, I don’t see him nearly often enough. He’s a good man who has raised a good family, and he owns a healthy sense of appreciation for not only the life he has now, but also the lives we had years ago as kids.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Cheerful green of wheat fights winter blahs
There is a light drizzle of freezing rain tapping at the door of my cabin today. It is little more than a week before the words I am writing are due to appear on your breakfast table or work desk with your morning coffee and scrambled eggs. But I write when I can, and today, despite a full schedule of televised football games, and the stacks of ungraded papers in my briefcase, and a good book lying open on my nightstand, I am clacking away on a keyboard to the whir of a heater and the steady drip of my gutters.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: On the simple joys of watching it snow ...
It began to snow about 20 minutes ago, as I write this, light, wind-driven flakes that fall silently into my woods as I watch from a window.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: On this day above all, ‘Peace on earth, good will to men’
More than a year after his wife’s death, the great American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, wrote in his diary on Christmas Day.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Remembering a Lefty Frizzell-kind of Christmas ...
My brother and sister and I sat around a Thanksgiving dinner table a month ago, shifting in our seats just enough to make our yet-to-be digested turkey sit a little more easily, and, as we often do when we get together, we reminisced about our childhoods for a while.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The wonders of wading in ‘The Iridescence of a Shallow Stream’
I have no idea how many times I have written a story that begins with the wistful phrase, “When I was a boy. ...”
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Little man who came to dinner changes feel of household
My 7-year-old nephew, Carson, came to visit us last week. That in itself isn’t earth-shattering news, for he often drops by with one of his parents or the other, the last time dressed as a ghoul for Halloween. But for a couple like Joanie and me, whose youngest child is now nearly two decades past Carson’s age, having a little guy like him in the house, even for a few hours, takes a bit of adjusting.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Reflections: a bit of red glass and our daily thanksgivings
I sat in the half-light of my old desk lamp a few nights ago, a chilly wind blowing in from the northwest that made me appreciative of my long-sleeved shirt and purring heater.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Growing up — and ‘old’ — with many mouths to feed
At our family reunion last summer, I asked my brother if I could borrow a pair of photo albums he had put together. Over the past couple of years, I have committed quite a few of our family’s old yellowing snapshots to newly cropped and digitalized lives, and I wanted to do the same with some of the pictures John has collected for himself.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Violets in October – a pleasant surprise
I guess I don’t pay much attention to the weather forecasts these days because it surprised me a bit when our furnace kicked on a few nights ago.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A library is a good thing — even a little, homegrown one
I grew up with libraries, and I can’t imagine there ever being a time when I won’t want to wander one exploring it like some bookworm-Balboa, finding an author or title that I never really knew existed before. Creating those “Eureka” moments seems to be a dying interest now that so many of us download and digest books electronically without ever really considering that there just might be some hidden gem we’d have liked even more had we simply stumbled upon it on a shelf by accident. I think those moments of discovery are not unlike kicking up lost treasure a mile from where X marks the spot.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The ‘soothsayer’ who came to dinner
I’ve had a good time opening my mail these past few weeks. Sure, I still received the usual junk about lower credit card rates and satellite television packages, but the genuine letters made me smile; most were about a story I wrote in late August.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The agony of de‘feet’ has this writer on his heels
I don’t know if I can electrocute myself by using a computer and soaking my feet in a pan of warm water at the same time, but I am contemplating taking the risk. My feet, particularly the right foot, have staged a 10-digit rebellion over the past few months. After a half-century of commendable service, my pods are screaming to be taken in for repairs, a big inconvenience for a guy who works on his feet all day and whose “sole” form of serious exercise is putting one foot in front of another walking the local roadways.
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Mike Lunsford: Summer’s hidden beauty worth the wait
The great naturalist John Burroughs once said that nature teaches more than she preaches. I can’t recall a summer where that rings true more than this one, for that old sun of ours truly taught us a thing or two these past three months.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: It’s time to redefine the concept of ‘assisted living’
Although it has been nearly two months now, I can’t forget the few afternoon hours I spent on a hot June day this summer at a local “assisted living” facility in town. I had been asked to speak to a group of men there about Father’s Day, but for most part, the wonderful old guys who came to listen certainly made my day more memorable than I did theirs.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Observations on smooth stones and blue-green water…
It was raining when I began to write this. Although no one could rightfully call what we got this afternoon a “downpour,” it was nice to have my windows open to hear the steady drops of a passing shower tapping on my dry-as-dust deck and hard-as-concrete yard.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: This summer has us recalling the heat of ’36
It was “only” 99 degrees one afternoon last week when I decided to work on a backyard deck. With a jack and a drill and a little more sweat than I wanted to invest in the project, I went about the business of leveling its sags and dips a bit. The sun pounded down on my head and shoulders like a thug’s blackjack, but as I packed my tools and drank a glass of cool water under a big maple tree a few hours later, I couldn’t help but think about how lucky I’ve been these past few dusty and drought-stricken weeks. I have worked under this summer’s heat lamp for only a few hours at a time, but God help the roofers and utility linesmen and firemen, and so many others, who are out in it day after long hot day.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: We had no better friend than Andy Taylor
The world is a sadder place now that Andy Griffith has died, but at least we still have Andy Taylor.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Wading deeper into the subject of Blue Herons
Like a relative who has worn out his welcome, the hot, parched weather of this young summer has already overstayed its visit with us, so my wife and I have found ourselves walking our road later in the evenings to keep our feet cool and our backs dry.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Thanking two dads whose gifts have never stopped coming…
It is nearly a week until Father’s Day, but I have had my dad, and my father-in-law — a second dad to me — on my mind today. I wrote about both men just a few weeks ago, but I have set my mind to write about them again anyway. I don’t want this story to be sad; they both loved to laugh and wouldn’t want that. No, I just wanted to tell them hello, and to thank them again for what they still do for me.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Raising a flag for my father, veteran or not
My daughter, Ellen, and I stood at my parents’ graves on Mother’s Day a few weeks back and talked about how it couldn’t possibly have been so long since we lost them. My dad, for instance, has been gone for 16 years, and that is nearly unimaginable
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Time to become one of the boys of summer again …
Besides writing for a living, I teach school, and I’m not ashamed to tell people that I still love my classroom. I’ve been a teacher for 33 years, all of them in the same school district, and virtually all of them in the same building. But I also have to tell you that if the next few weeks don’t slide by pretty quickly, I may just let loose of the last thread of sanity from which I have been dangling for a while now. There are a lot of teachers out there who feel the same way.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: It’s time for us to get the real lowdown on dirt…
I have had my hands in the soil as of late. Two Fridays ago, I planted a viburnum bush, three chrysanthemums and a yellow poplar, not because it happened to be Earth Day, but because it was sunny and warm, and I had the whole afternoon to myself. The dirt I scraped out of and back into the shallow holes I dug near a backyard picket fence smelled good, and when dampened with a few sprinkles of water, it soon found its way into the deep wrinkles of my knuckles and under my fingernails. For the most part, I have nothing but good things to say about dirt.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Make big money: Raise worms at home for fun and profit…
When I think about all of the crazy things my brother and sister and I did just to make a few dollars when we were kids, I can’t help but feel a little sorry for teens this summer as they try to find jobs in what is supposed to be a very tight market. Money, to say the least, was a rare commodity when we were growing up, but you have to at least give us credit for trying.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: ‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d…’
Had white lace curtains been hanging in the west window of my cabin, I would have had a perfect Wyeth painting to watch last Thursday. A gentle breeze was wafting through my screens, and the sunlight of a warm late March day was fractured by the window sill as it poured onto my legs and feet. I could catch the scent of lilacs as it was carried in by that wind, and it and the subtle melody of the chimes that hang just outside made me as lazy as an old cat.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A report from the country as a new season brings sense of renewal
Regardless of what the calendar may yet say, spring has happened. It couldn’t have come too soon, and it wasn’t just last week and its windy 70s that have convinced me. I have been keeping a journal of sorts in my head for a fortnight now, stashing away reports of birds and buds and sounds in the crammed cabinets of my mind, all in a file marked, “The New Season.”
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Feeding time at the homestead draws a host of new guests
I stepped outside into the warmth of an unusually mild early March morning last week to do what I always do just before I grab my briefcase and book bag and lunch bag and head off to work. It’s nearly always dark when I leave, even as the sun gets up earlier and earlier in the late winter, so I often go about the business of feeding our cats with porch lights on and a flashlight in hand.
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