Oklahoma Dreaming: Ice Storm
by Donna Schoenkopf
I saw my first falling snow at the age of 15 in Oklahoma, on Thanksgiving Day, fifty years ago.
I thought it was ash from a fire somewhere.
(In the third grade in Hawaii, we made huge snowflakes out of white paper, the size of doilies, folded and cut so that geometric shapes emerged miraculously as the paper was unfolded. Because of this innocent exercise as an 8-year-old, I thought all snowflakes were like my paper ones ... huge. How can a person reach the age of 15 with such faulty information? It happens.)
So that Thanksgiving Day, in the late ’50s, I was amazed with the snowflakes’ tiny little selves, and shocked to realize that it was impossible to see the intricacies of their lace.
But the winters I have experienced here in Oklahoma in my middle age are entirely different than the ones I experienced back in the day. We had snow then. Not ice storms. Things have changed.
It’s because of global warming.
You see: It’s too warm for snow, so rain falls, but hits a cold spot close to the Earth and freezes as it hits the ground.
OR: It rains, then freezes overnight when the temperature drops.
Either way, you get ice. And lots of it, Brothers and Sisters.
Last year the ice storm was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in Nature. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, was encased in the clearest, most sparkling ice you can imagine. Smooth and clean. It exploded trees and made cars and people slide across it.
This year, no snow. Ice again. This time I heard it hit. Early in the morning it smacked against my metal roof, pounding me awake and making the dog jump. A huge lightning flash, seen through my closed eyes at three in the morning, blue as the ice that was falling, lit the sky. Thunder, LOUD, right above my head and then a couple of other hits of lightning and thunder and then silence.
What the HELL????
In the morning it looked like snow had covered everything. But it wasn’t snow. It was ice pellets. Four inches of ice pellets. It was crusty and hard and gorgeous. The pond was frozen all the way down to the bottom, coloring it a milky bluish white with art deco slashes across it.
Diego the Puppy (now Dog) had never seen such a thing before and stepped gingerly out onto the crunchy, ice-laden deck and licked the frozen water in his water bowl. The cats ventured out, suspiciously, and picked their way over to safety in the east woods. I stood in my beautiful house and looked with wonder at the scene before me.
You do know that I have glass, in the form of sliding glass doors, along the whole southern wall of my house, don’t you? And that’s sixty feet of gorgeousness as you look down the hill to the pond.
So ... it was real purdy. And full of adventure, it turned out.
I stayed home that day and just relished the morning, afternoon, evening, in my cozy home. (Having a 60-foot southern wall turns my house into a greenhouse and keeps everything at a pleasant 75 degrees, without the use of my heater.) During the day the light was gorgeous, pure and white, and filled every inch of my house. A deep crimson red cardinal, all puffed up from the cold, sat on an icy branch of the cottonwood tree outside my window. Chickadees, like Japanese paintings, hopped here and there. All was silent. Heaven.
The next day, my Puritan genes prodded me to DO something, so I decided I had to go to town for something or other. I wrapped myself up, nice and warm, and went outside. I wasn’t going anywhere so fast. The car was totally ice-covered. My sister Annie had given me a handy helpful hint about using rubbing alcohol to defrost ice on your car. (Ice takes forever to defrost when you use your car heater, and that doesn’t include all the fuel spent doing it.) But I didn’t have any rubbing alcohol left after the last mini-ice morning. So I checked my liquor supply and got my cheapest gin out and lugged it outside and poured some on the windshield. The top layer of ice kinda melted, but that left an inch and a half still cemented to my windshield.
And now my car smelled like a giant martini.
So defrost with heater, it was. It took TWENTY minutes! And my little Prius’ gas mileage indicator plummeted from 44.3 mpg to 41.1 mpg.
Feeling slightly irritated, I got in the car, drove carefully down the crunchy, white, perfectly pristine driveway, all curvy and pretty through the woods, to the ice-covered county road, and approached Highway 177.
As I got closer I realized I would have to negotiate a pretty hefty ice bank, an ice bank about 2 feet tall, created by the highway snow-scraping guys when they cleared their stretch of road.
Oh, maaaaaaaan.
I was trapped.
But WAIT! Tire tracks showed a way over the mountain of ice, so I bravely pulled forward and felt all proud and brave as I steered my little Prius over the hump and then my tires began to spin and spit and I realized I was stuck, wedged tight, on those chunks of ice.
I got out and saw in a trice it was jammed in the ice ... I looked at it, and I thought a bit, and I looked at my frozen chum ...
(Thank you Robert Service for "The Cremation of Sam McGee".)
...and thought of the spatula I had lying on the front seat of my car. The spatula I used to scrape light dustings of ice off my windshield on less intense mornings. I grabbed it and kneeled down on the chunks and started scooping away ice from the front tires and reached as far as I could under the car to push ice out from under the undercarriage.
No way. The spatula bent under the weight of the ice chunks and I could never reach the middle of the car. My arm was too short.
Oh, maaaaaaaaaaan!
I had my cell phone (I LOVE my cell phone!) and called the sheriff, who handed me off to the county supervisor, who handed me off to the highway department who told me they were not gonna be there anytime soon, lady. They were busy, for cryin’ out loud.
Just then Neighbor Guy drove up. He’s a new neighbor, so I didn’t know his name. He drove up in his pickup with his wife and 8-year-old (?) son and stopped to help. We all got out and surveyed the situation. While we were considering the options Neighbor Guy’s five puppies and little white pomeranian ran up, tails wagging, looking for fun and games, which included running out onto the highway. Five little puppies and a white pomeranian, racing back and forth, me cringing with every passing car. Neighbor Guy couldn’t care less. If they got killed, they got killed. I tried to corral them, but good luck with that! Finally, with wife and me pushing the front end and Neighbor Guy giving it the gas, my darling car broke free and I was saved!
Thank you! Thank you! and blowing kisses to them all as they drove off down the highway, I backed up and went home, puppies and pomeranian following until I outran them, to get my shovel and pitchfork to dig a REAL pathway through the ice bank. But halfway back to the highway, the puppies and the pomeranian saw me again and they, realizing they could have a wonderful time playing games with me, gave chase. It was the cutest sight you can imagine. Just close your eyes. Can you see them? Five little half-breed malamutes and a white pomeranian, gleefully chasing my car. Yeah, they are really having a great time.
But then I had visions of puppy pancakes splattered all over the highway, so I stopped about 100 yards from my destination, got out of my car and spent some time shooing them home, and as I turned to get into my car, I realized ...
IT WASN’T THERE!!
I raised my eyes. I saw it DRIVING ITSELF down the road and tipping itself gracefully into the ditch at the side of the road.
I HAD FORGOTTEN TO PUT IT IN PARK!
Oh, maaaaaaaaaaaaaaannn!!
Neighbor Guy was gone. The highway scraping guys told me to bug off. And my car was in a ditch.
I mentally kicked my own butt several times and then burst out laughing. It was hilarious. Couldn’t help it.
As I stood there guffawing OTHER Neighbor Guy, Jim, just happened to mosey up to get his mail. I told him my tale of stupidity and we had a good laugh and he called still ANOTHER Neighbor Guy, Steve of the ten pitbulls, who sent his wife over in their fourwheel drive Yukon, complete with car-pulling chain, to pull me out and zippidy doo dah, I was out!.
I got my shovel and pitchfork out from the back seat, dug me a path, and got the hell out of there.
I drove down the highway slowly, and saw several abandoned cars along the way. Coulda been me.
When I got to Tecumseh, four miles down the road, I saw that there were some tracks through the ice, made by the citizens of the town, so I negotiated my way to the library, which wasn’t too hard.
But it wasn’t open. Nothing was open. A few cars were out, but every single store was closed. Schools, too.
It was like one of those sci fi movies in which our hero comes to a totally silent and abandoned town. I went home and hunkered down.
Little by little things came back to life. Oddly, the library was the first to reopen. Gas stations opened next, the Sonic Drive-In, and last, dead last, the mail got delivered. I don’t blame the Post Office. It was impossible and impassible down those crazy little roads in the boonies.
The ice lasted for a week. It was too cold for it to melt completely, so a little melting during the day led to a refreeze at night, making everything really, really slippery.
How slippery? Have you ever seen a cat slide on ice? That’s how slippery it was. Diego the Dog slid from one end of the deck to the other when he took a few running steps one morning. It was hilarious. I actually think he thought it was fun. He had a big smile on his face, legs splayed, ears and tail up.
During the week, as it started to warm up, huge, ridged blocks of ice, four inches thick, began to break loose from my roof and slide off, crashing to the ground with loud explosions, scaring poor Diego so badly he spent several days at Neighbor Guy’s house. With the puppies and the pomeranian.
He is a real chicken.
One lovely afternoon a few days after most of the ice on the roof had fallen, Diego brought all five puppies over for a visit. They are cute as buttons. And skinny and hungry. One started eating some wood chips, that’s how hungry they were.
Diego loved them. He pIayed with them and licked them and put his big old paw on them and smiled the smile of a proud papa.
I got some dry dogfood out and strewed it over the ice and the puppies and Diego sucked it up in no time. Two of the pups had a territorial spat over it so I got more and threw that out and they gobbled that all down, too.
Their bellies were fat. They waddled over to a sunny patch on the ice sheet of my deck and lay down and slept it off.
Diego took them all home an hour later. Close your eyes. Can you see them all trotting off down the driveway through the woods? Awwwwwwwwww.
All the ice is almost gone now, but the pond is still ice blue and there are patches of white here and there in the woods. Mostly it is soggy, red mud.
Mud season is coming.
Oh, maaaaaaaaaaaaaaannn!
donna@fourstory.org
Comments
What is with calling 65 “middle age?” Hah! Great story again Donna, thanks and keep it coming.
2009-02-06 by JoAnne SangerI love these stories! Does Diana Stalter do any writing?She`s good you know. Untill next time love Fran
2009-02-10 by Fran Rutter
I suppose these comments will be repetitious but your style is so unselfconscious. This must be where Rebecca gets her talent. I like the breeziness of your writing and the attention to small details. Repetition plays an important part in your stories. Helps to imbed the essence of what you are saying! More, more!
I am going to try to send you one of my stories. Don’t know if I am electronic enough to do that. We’ll see.
2009-02-06 by shelle