Day One
I really feel like blowing off fire and ice.
The topic doesn’t speak to me. There is fire. There is ice. I don’t need a pretentious French psychoanalyst to instruct me about what fire best symbolizes and what it cannot.
But then a kernel of an idea begins to tumble through my brain just like a cartoon acorn dropped upon the top of a snow capped summit, accumulating layers of crystals as it rolls down to the foot of the mountain, becoming a terrible and icy boulder flattening all other thoughts in its path.
I plan to write a short tale of a man who is committing a yule time arson on the day before he ships out with his unit to Iraq. My fire and ice story is thawing out in my mental refrigerator.
As soon as it is ready, I sit down at my computer and begin to write.
“He had been wondering for the past five minutes whether the wall of fire would collapse on top of him . . . . “
My computer dies. The lights flicker and then expire. The fridge stops humming. The towels in the dryer stop spinning. The traffic light a half mile down the road sways impotent. God has taken the batteries out of the back of the world.
I turn off my computer and unplug the modem, feeling around for the flashlight I had strategically placed on my desk in anticipation. A wind storm from off the Pacific was blowing into town with 60 mile per hour winds - more than enough to bring a few weary fir trees, with shallow roots mired in soft mud, down upon utility wires.
The story of the pryomaniacal soldier boy would have to wait.
It is a strange sensation to suddenly live in a world of darkness and cold when your natural habitat features central heating, electrified filaments and instantaneous media. Every noise becomes amplified. You can hear a thumb tack rolling on the floor from several rooms away. The body begins to slow as if preparing for hibernation as the mercury dips. You layer sweaters atop sweaters in order to corral what little heat the body produces.
By flashlight, I read a few stories from Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges to take my mind off the numbing cold. Crazy, I think I can live like this for a while. The quiet is welcome.
Day Two
The next morning I’m happy to learn I still have hot water from my gas water heater. I take a shower by electric torch light and then drive into work. The whole town is grey and everything is not illuminated. I discover classes have been cancelled.
My cell phone still works and mom calls asking if I can help move my grandparents out of their side of the duplex and into my parents’ other house which is vacant but miraculously has power and heat. I move their TV, DVD player, grandpa’s favorite chair, a folding table and four folding chairs, groceries for the long haul, a self-inflating air bed and several cots into the unfurnished house. Here they stay in our own makeshift disaster shelter over the next two days watching DVDs my grandparents like (Elf, Finding Nemo and Phantom of the Opera) and eating Kentucky Fried Chicken and cole slaw.
Things could be unpleasant, but they are not. There are people in much worse predicaments. At this moment, souls are breathing in fumes from portable power generators because they just don’t know any better.
I return to my house because one, my cat is still back there and needs to be fed and given an insulin shot and two, I’m going a little crazy back at the majestic family shelter. Outside, it’s below freezing and thin layers of ice are forming on puddles in the street. It’s too cold to even read, so I listen to a local station on my crank-it dynamo disaster radio.
A mother is calling in and crying because she and her children can’t find a warm place to rest. The cold is breaking all of us down. The lucky ones have wood burning stoves and fireplaces. The truly unlucky ones have elevated levels of carbon monoxide in their blood streams. The rest of us, our blood is coagulating into frosty goo inside our veins. The radio host implores everyone to reach out to our neighbors.
I lock my door and hunker down for another cold night. I think for a moment we as a race have grown soft.
Day Three
The sun breaks through the clouds in the morning, but the sad thing is that the fireball is just a tease. Clear mornings are cold mornings because heat escapes without a blanket of clouds to seal it in. Sometime during this morning, a man and his dog, walking a few miles away to survey the destruction, meet up with a downed power line. I will never have the chance to meet either of these two.
I throw on some jeans over my thermals and drive back to the shelter. It was a tough night for the elders. My 93 year-old grandpa slept in his chair, unable to get comfortable on a cot. Grandma has the look of a weary refugee in her eyes. Mom is flipping pancakes on a stovetop griddle in the kitchen.
My back aches from the lifting yesterday and the cold last night. I lay on the floor to stretch it out as the heat from the floor ducts starts to invade my body. Grandma tucks her legs under her and sits beside me in the style she had become accustomed to as a child. She begins telling me a story of what it was like living near the end of the war.
She lived in a parade of homes. She and her family moved at the whim of the U.S. Army Air Force. On each occasion flaming napalm from an incendiary bomb burned a sheltering home, she moved on to another house of a friend of distant relative. Once she lived in the home of a doctor, a very nice man she says, but his house burned. She carried many buckets of water from the local riverbank so that homes might be saved, but none ever were. The fires of that war were lethal and powerful, sucking civilians into the furnace of Tokyo streets by the rush of air feeding the flames.
To think I thought she had escaped Tokyo by the time the firebombing had begun. I had thought she had told me a story once about boiling grass to eat in a country house far outside the city during war time. The only sibling that had been sent out from the city was a younger brother.
I drive back to my grandparents duplex to retrieve a pair of old TV rabbit ear antennas because they’ve already run through their favorite DVDs. The twinkling Christmas lights announce the resumption of power. I call my mom on her cell phone to tell her the good news.
“Moshi, moshi?”
Grandma answers my mom’s phone and welcomes the news with both a pleasing tone and a stoicism that takes me by surprise. I hear my mother celebrating with a hearty “whoop” in the background. The world is returning to its noisy self again. I look down upon her kitchen floor to see a bucket left half full with water, the sheen of ice forming a crust at the surface.