Oklahoma Dreaming: The Blizzard
by Donna Schoenkopf
Weather is a big deal in Oklahoma. Whenever my kids or friends call from out of state, I seem to either be telling them tales of my animals or what the weather has been doing. Come to think of it, I seem to be writing about those two topics a lot, too.
Geographically speaking, according to Genius Son John, the most intense weather is in the middle of continents. It’s all about temperature, land forms, air masses, water.
So here I sit in the middle of the United States of America, not thirty miles from “Four Corners,” which LITERALLY is the center of our great nation, getting the full force of every kind of weather there is. Except tsunamis. And, come to think of it, I even get tsunamis down the hill in my pond. (You should see that sucker swirl and blow during weird windy times.)
Well, Christmas week wasn’t any different. We had a hell of a blizzard. A(n) historical blizzard.
We had been warned. We had been warned by the most technologically innovative weather programs in the nation. When there’s “bad” weather all the local stations shut down programming and go straight to nonstop weather reporting. All day. All night. Screw American Idol and Wheel of Fortune. It’s weather time.
The maps, radar, on-the-ground storm chasers with their weather cameras, the full panoply of state-of-the-art weather gizmos give the weather reports such drama and intensity that it leaves me riveted for hours on end. I’ve watched red rectangles on the radar filled with tornados pushing their way toward me. I’ve watched the pink hail centers of storms come my way. And light and dark green rain patches march across the map. Storms in Minco. El Reno under siege. Carnegie in the path of devastation. Moore threatened. (The really big tornado in Moore some years back was THREE MILES WIDE!!!)
Damn.
So, I’ll repeat, we got a little action this past week, too.
A big blizzard.
Now Oklahoma doesn’t get the snow and ice that our lovely states to the north get ... Vermont, Minnesota, North Dakota beat us in those categories. But we got a really good blizzard this time.
It began Christmas Eve morning. Reports of a blizzard coming our way had started a few days before. I, getting used to big-time weather, didn’t pay too much attention. (At least it wasn’t tornados!) But ex-husband Jim, a retired insurance adjuster (And poet. He was runner-up for Oklahoma Poet Laureate last year. He’s sort of like Charles Ives. You know, Charles Ives, the modernist music composer who wrote the most innovative classical pieces of the time. Just take a listen to “The Fourth of July.” All his compositions were written after work. He, too, was an insurance man. He was also the innovator of estate-planning, of all things.) said it was going to be a good one.
Jim loves storms. Besides storms being his personal money-maker, he likes the restfulness of being forced to be inside, reading.
So I was expecting something. About 10:30 in the morning I noticed the sky getting grayer and little spits of hard ice pellets hitting the ground. Being out in the country on a gravel road, and my only path to civilization being Killer Highway 177, a two-laner with lots of hills, I decided, just to be on the safe side, to go to town and get dog food and milk while I could. I pretty much had plenty of groceries, other than those things.
So off I went to the little Fire Lake Convenience store in Tecumseh, four miles away.
I got out of my car in the parking lot and the pellets were thicker, stinging my face. Walked over to the store. Got the dog food and milk. Paid the cashier. And then the bag boy said, “Be careful out there. It’s slippery.”
In ten minutes?
I smiled, thinking HE thought I was an unstable old lady unfit to walk on anything but thick carpeted floors.
I pushed my cart carrying the large dog food bag and milk through the sliding glass door and BAM! Hit ice.
In ten minutes, the time it took me to get my stuff and pay the clerk, ice had totally taken over the parking lot.
At least I wasn’t TOTALLY surprised. I would have fallen if it hadn’t been for the bag boy. (Thanks, kid.)
There was no pushing the cart to the car, that would have been a REAL disaster, and I could barely keep upright myself, but I managed to put the bag of dog food on the ground, using it as my support, and carry the milk in the other hand. I then slid, scooted, inched my way over the asphalt to my car. Threw everything in. Backed up slowly and pulled out onto the main street.
Everybody was driving reeeeeal slowly. I turned onto Killer Highway 177 and felt my tires swirl a little. I had big hills to go up. Would I make it with them iced over?
But I did make it.
Just in time.
Got home. Unloaded the car with beebees of ice hitting me in the face, inched my way across my deck, fell into the house, and breathed a sigh of relief.
It was just after 11:00 AM. The wind started blowing even harder after I had entered the house. Huge wind. Blowing ice pellets. It was blowing those ice pellets sideways, from the north. The biggest trees down the hill by the pond were being buffeted and bounced. The pond was whirling. I could barely see outside.
It was glorious.
I swear to god, I love this house. I am a genius. There is no better entertainment than sitting in a huge room, with huge windows on three sides, looking out at Nature and all she has wrought.
This huge storm blew and spit and smashed things while I, all toasty and warm and safe, watched the whole show.
It went on for hours. My trusty DISH satellite kept the TV going with its colorful commentating. Everything local was pre-empted, of course. And the reporters were saying things like “record-breaking” and “historical” while the wind moaned low and long, its basso profundo voice providing the background music to the action in front of me.
All my animals were inside, the cats Rosa Luxemburg and Che Guevara, and the dogs Diego Rivera and Angela Davis. We all watched the storm. And were cozy.
Eventually I decided on a movie and had the good luck to run into Wonder Boys with Michael Douglas and Frances McDormand and Katie Holmes (pre-Tom Cruise) and it was good.
Then the phone rang and it was Neighbor Jim, checkin’ up on me. (I love country neighbors!)
About 2:30 in the afternoon the snowflakes started. The wind was blowing them sideways from north to south. But then the chaos of the wind began, blowing those flakes like they were in a washing machine, tumbling furiously. Wind would switch directions constantly. Sometimes huge swirls, resembling tornados, formed.
Snow was piling up. First the deck disappeared. Then the drifts started building up against the sliding glass doors on the south and the back door on the north. By the time it stopped snowing, the drifts were halfway up the doors. And the doors were frozen shut.
I managed to push the back door open to let the dogs out. Ohhhhhhh, how they LOVED the snow! They leaped and frolicked, big smiles on their faces. Then off they raced down the driveway, probably to Neighbor Jim’s.
After an hour they were back, icicles hanging from their nostrils, snow and ice covering their fur. Little Eskimo dogs.
Happy dogs.
The computer and TV still worked. The electricity still kept things humming and toasty. It was heaven.
Later in the day I saw a Facebook entry from nephew Mike, saying he was stuck in the storm. Then a phone call HOURS later from nephew Alex, saying it had taken them six hours to get home.
Went to bed.
Woke up Christmas Day to a beautiful scene. Perfect whiteness. Stillness. Just the five of us, the animals and I, snowbound in our housie.
I say snowbound because I, of course, managed to get myself stuck in a huge snowdrift/mud hole which I created by spinning my tires when I tried to free myself from the snowdrift. So my darling car was stuck. I was supposed to pick up Son John at the airport. This was not to be.
I called him. Made arrangements for him to stay over in Oklahoma City. Sat back and relaxed.
Ahhhhhhhh. Another day of peace and quiet. It was fabulous. I watched old movies and ate. A lot.
The day after Christmas Neighbor Orval came over with his pickup and, after TWO HOURS of huffing and puffing, we FINALLY got free of the frozen mud and snowdrift and I was off and running to Oklahoma City to pick up My Boy.
On the way, I saw, I am not kidding, I swear, EIGHTY-SEVEN cars off the side of the Interstate in various states of weirdness. Cars had plunged down huge hills, banged up against dividers, were backwards on the side of the road.
Eighty-seven.
John thinks I’m lying. And I may have miscounted a little, and I DID count some (five or six) huge mud gouges in the snow as stalled cars which had been pulled out, but even with all that, I would say there were a minimum of seventy cars having been abandoned by their owners on a bleak and blizzardy day.
The drive into the city was a little hairy. Ice still covered a lot of the road. But I picked Sonny Boy up, turned around and headed back, and already the snow and ice had melted off the highway and the drive was easy-breezy.
Home.
We made our way down the ravaged driveway. Threw our stuff inside.
And called it a day. Everybody home. All’s right with the world.
Well, that’s it, folks.
Hope you had a great Christmas, too.
I sure did.
donna@fourstory.org
Comments
Wow, glad all ended well. Love your writing! I enjoyed being snowed in too, with my fat cats Bob and Petunia, snoozing and eating and quietly relaxing and puttering the days away. I lit candles on Xmas Eve and Petoony caught her tail on fire—twice! I was standing by and put it out w/my hands, but whew—smell of burned hair.
Ted Kooser, former poet laureate of Nebraska, was also an insurance man, BTW. I bet you’d like his writing. Sometimes he has a small poetry column in the Shawnee News-Star, or used to.
2009-12-29 by Judy Singdear ann,
ahhhhh, my windows. they actually act as a greenhouse and keep the house so warm during the day that i have to open them to cool off a little. i had planned it that way. south-facing wall catches the low winter sunlight, POURING light and heat into the house. at night i do have to turn on the heat, but turn it off when i go to sleep. and yes, they are double paned. thanks for asking.
dear judy,
you sound as though you had a very lovely christmas. hilarious about petoony’s tail. (sorry. it just IS funny when you think of it in cartoon terms.) i’m gonna look up ted kooser. thanks.
2009-12-29 by Donna SchoenkopfWe had a similar Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Day After Christmas. No kids or grandkids could make it over for the traditional celebration (gifts, dinner, Jesus’ birthday cake candle extinguishing, wrestling, running through the house, modeling new clothes, dropping, breaking, spilling, etc.). The quiet and solitude was wonderful! And by Sunday, we were ready for them….and glad to see them.
2009-12-29 by betsyOnce heard Kooser..Delightful man. The real adjuster/poet was
Wallace Stevens,VP in Charge of Claims Hartford Ins Co. Academic
poet….Not easy to read…....Once got into a fist fight with
Hemingway at that bar in Fl where H. had the 6 toed cats. We
should still be getting Kooser but new editor ain’t into poems.
I will back up your numbers count on the highway with the feedback from Alan and Ladonna on their drive to Western Oklahoma on Saturday. They counted 99 cars off the road from Shawnee to the Vici exit in Western OK. I’m not sure how many miles that is, but there were a lot of cars off the road. Lynn
2009-12-29 by Lynn DenslowSpent 32 hrs in our car, xmas eve and xnas day trying to pick up grown children from the “O” states at Will Rogers airport, ditch on I-40 twice, dear God I hate this friggin state. They do not cope here with weather of any kind, always hindsight, shoulda, coulda, didn’t. Total dumbasses! Bitter? Not me! My novella awaits me.
2009-12-31 by Janice WoodWallace Stevens worked for an insurance company too. I suggest you ponder this and propose some explanation for the link between these two seemingly antithetical professions.
2010-01-03 by Brian Langston
Holy-Moley! You DO get weather. Lovely pics. Glad you came through safe and sound. A question, with those huge windows: are they double paned? Keep thinking about heat-loss in all the cold. Your house must be insulated up the wazoo.
2009-12-29 by Ann Calhoun