The Great Ice Storm of ‘98
Photo of the damage around the Bates College Quad in Lewiston, Maine
(Originally written for a literary nonfiction class in college in October 2016)
Around where I live, January 1998 has gone down in infamy thanks to what has become known as the Great Ice Storm of 1998. The storm lasted from January 4th to January 10th, affecting large areas of Ontario, Quebec, New York, Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. In the areas worst affected by the storm, up to 130 mm (5 inches) of ice accumulated, destroying or severely damaging entire forests. Destruction of power lines meant millions were left without electricity for up to three weeks. Roads were rendered impassible due to the thick layers of ice, and 35 people died as a direct result of the effects of the storm, 28 of them in Canada alone.
I was only two-and-a-half years old then, so I don’t remember anything about what happened. I recall some of the stories my parents told of the events, especially a video my father took of some iced-over trees in the backyard of our house in Norwood. In preparation for this essay, I asked them to relate their experiences of that frightful storm. These are their stories:
Grandma Carr (b. 1943)
During the time of the storm, my mother’s parents owned a dairy farm in the town of Waddington. The farm would cease operations later that year after her father died of a heart attack, and the family decided to sell the cattle. My family has lived on the property since we moved there from Norwood.
This story comes from my grandmother, recalling how Grandpa Carr kept the cows watered even though the automatic pumps were rendered useless due to the widespread power outages. He resorted to borrowing water from a hand-cranked pump on the hill where our neighbors, the Murrays, lived and, with the help of a farmhand, transported the water back to the barn by hand.
We were living on the farm at the time. We lost power for about a week. It wasn’t much of a problem for us because we had a wood stove to keep us warm, plus the Armstrongs, who lived around the corner from us, provided water. But getting water to the thirty head of cattle we had at the time would be a problem. Cattle need about ten gallons of water daily, and the power outage rendered the automatic pumps useless. But getting 300 gallons of water to the cows daily would be a problem. Fortunately, my husband had a solution. Our neighbors at the end of the road, the Murrays, had a hand-pumped well at the top of the hill they lived on. With the help of our neighbor, L. B., the water was hand-pumped into five-gallon buckets and transported back to the barn by hand. They did this twice a day, 150 gallons at a time until the power came back on. All I can say is, thank goodness we had that well, or else I don’t know what we would have done.
Mom (b. 1968)
My mother had two children, myself included, and a Golden Retriever named Duke. We lived in Norwood at the time of the storm. I was two-and-a-half years old, and my sister was only nine months old. My mother was obviously very concerned about how we would fare in these conditions. Before the brunt of the storm descended, she packed us up in the car and drove us to our grandparents’ house in Colton, which had a generator and a wood stove in case the power went out. We spent five days there, after which our power came back on. After that, we hosted another family for about a week and had a little get-together with my Uncle Doug’s family.
As I mentioned before, we now live in Waddington on what used to be the Carr farm. We added my brother to the family about two years after the storm. Duke passed away in 2008 at the age of twelve.
About a day before the worst of the storm came down on us, my husband and I packed the car up in preparation for my trip to Colton. I had two children at the time, a two-year-old and a nine-month-old, plus a Golden Retriever dog, so I didn’t think I could get the children everything they needed without power. Fortunately, my husband’s parents had a generator at their house in Colton, which I figured I could take advantage of.
The drive there was rather harrowing. The storm had already gotten pretty intense while I was en route. The roads were already starting to ice over. In fact, the day after was when the streets were closed, and anyone caught driving would be prosecuted. I even had to dodge a few falling tree limbs on my way there.
Fortunately, we made it there in one piece. We ended up losing power over there the day after. With the generator and the wood fire, though, our stay at Grandma and Grandpa D’s (our nickname for them) was quite comfortable. The power at my place was back quicker than most, so we only had to stay there for five days.
Back at our place, we had a family who didn’t get their power back as quickly stay with us for about a week. They, too, had a baby, plus two other children. True, they did like their cigarettes a bit too much, but we didn’t mind having them over. We’ve always been the hospitable type.
We also had my husband’s brother Doug over with his family for a get-together. Our freezers weren’t working, so we rushed to get the food out of them and into our bellies before it spoiled. It was a wonderful feast. We cooked biscuits on the grill and had a giant strawberry shortcake for dessert.
It’s funny how we could pull such great memories out of such a terrible disaster. I guess that’s luck for you.
Dad (b. 1964)
My father was working at General Motors at the time of the storm. After my mother took us to Colton, my father stayed behind to look after the house. He camped in the garage where the woodstove was until the power returned. During this time, he filmed the trees around the house and hung out with the neighbors after General Motors closed down. After the roads were reopened for emergencies, he packed supplies, drove to Colton, and stayed there for a day or two. After returning home, there was much cleaning up in the yard, and the roof needed to be replaced, especially over the garage.
My father and mother have been married for twenty-two years now. He has long since left GM and now works for the New York Power Authority.
I was working at the General Motors plant in Massena at the time. When I realized the storm would be a huge deal, my wife and I decided that the kids would be better off at my parent’s house in Colton for the time being. I stayed behind because GM was still running at the time, so I still needed to report for work, plus I wanted to look after the house.
I basically camped out in the garage for the next three days because that’s where the wood stove was. By that, I mean literally “camped out.” I had a tent and a gas stove to cook my meals. I kept blankets over the windows to make sure the house didn’t get too cold.
GM ended up shutting down later that week. In fact, that was the only time I remember the plant ever shutting down entirely. So, now that I had some free time on my hands, I decided to survey the damage. It was almost beautiful the way the sunlight glinted off the ice. I captured several ice-caked trees on videotape, so my family has some idea of what that might have looked like. I measured the ice accumulation on the dog pen out back. Two inches, it was. Absolutely incredible. You know how the wood on the inside of a tree is yellow? No joke, when I went out in the woods to look around, yellow was all I could see. There were broken branches everywhere. I also killed time by visiting the neighbors, you know, having coffee with them, stuff like that.
Soon, the authorities said that we could travel on the roads if we had an emergency. So I packed up some diapers and other such baby stuff for the kids, and I rejoined my wife at Colton for a day or two.
After our power returned and we returned home, there were broken branches everywhere, so we spent some time cleaning up the yard. The roof was also pretty torn up, especially around the garage, so we had to fix that. The only thing on our property that was really damaged beyond repair was this beautiful lilac tree we’d planted in the front yard. A big load of ice slid off the roof and smashed it all to hell. I was kind of sad to see it go, but compared to what I could have lost in that storm, I certainly got off pretty easy.
Afterword
It is somewhat difficult to compare this disaster to the one Haruki Murakami talks about in Underground. The obvious reason is that the ice storm was a natural disaster entirely outside of man’s power to control. In contrast, the Tokyo gas attack was very much a human-caused disaster, to the point of being a premeditated terrorist attack. But then again, I am comparing the people who witnessed and survived these ordeals and their respective values, not the disasters themselves.
The most obvious differences in the portraits Murakami and I created were how our witnesses dealt with the aftermath of their respective disasters. One thing that really worried Murakami in the course of making his book was how most of the Japanese simply wanted to put the gas attacks behind them, to label the conflict between the Aum Shinrikyo cult and the rest of Japanese society as an unrealistic “good vs. evil” narrative, to put any memories related to the incident in what Murakami called “a trunk labeled THINGS OVER AND DONE WITH.” Murakami is highly critical of this attitude, as he thinks it prevents Japan from learning from the incident, strengthening its crisis management system, and, in general, taking responsibility for its failures.
In the case of the ice storm, however, judging from the eyewitness accounts I collected, the crisis management seemed to work rather efficiently at repairing the damage. There also appeared to be a general theme of acceptance that bad things happen occasionally and that it is our responsibility to clean up afterward and learn how to prepare for the next big weather event. In other words, “hope for the best and prepare for the worst.” Of course, this might be because we can’t pigeonhole the weather into a “good vs. evil” narrative. After all, nature doesn’t conform to our definitions of “evil.” We can accept that Mother Nature will rain down destruction on us occasionally. We seem to have a harder time accepting that there are people out there willing to be just as destructive with human life.
Hello, beautiful watchers! I’ve decided to publish yet another college writing assignment, this time for a literary nonfiction class instead of a creative nonfiction class. I don’t remember the exact parameters of the assignment now, but this was obviously from around the time when we were reading the 1997 book Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, which was legendary Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s account of the Tokyo subway sarin attack of March 1995. I think the assignment was to interview people we knew about a disaster or crisis we had experienced in their own lives. The 1998 ice storm was the only thing I could think of.
Looking over this essay several years later, the afterword section seems incredibly haunting, especially in the wake of the Trump administration. Compared with the ice storm and Aum Shinrikyo, the disastrous aftereffects of Agent Orange’s tyranny seem to straddle a liminal space between “human-caused” and “force of nature.” The effects are undoubtedly rooted in humans being inhumane to one another, but the problems have roots that go so far back in our history that it almost seems like nature taking its course. Indeed, anthropogenic climate change is a perfect demonstration of this insidious liminality.
Even so, my family members’ testimonies about their experiences during the ice storm are a great argument affirming Fred Rogers’ famous suggestion to “look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” Sure, some bad eggs take advantage of disasters to advantage or enrich themselves, sometimes even in the form of entire governments (as Naomi Klein demonstrates depressingly well in her book The Shock Doctrine). But there are far more of Mr. Rogers’ helpers waiting in the wings to help create what Rebecca Solnit might call “a paradise built in Hell.”
Before I go, I should probably warn you guys that it might be a while before the “best animated T.V. series of 2023” article comes out. I’m formatting the list by choosing my favorite series of each month, and there are many options to pick from. Perhaps too many, in fact. Indeed, April 2023 alone has twelve series I’m interested in checking out or catching up on, and as of this writing (February 25), I only just finished watching the first series on that list (Heavenly Delusion, if you’re curious). Therefore, I’ve decided to split this countdown into two articles because otherwise, it would likely take forever to come out.
That’s all for now. I’m working on that plus the “cryptids of Massachusetts” article as we speak. Stay tuned for when those come out, and I’ll see you next weekend.
P.S. Apparently, I wrote that my parents were married for twenty-two years in 2018, even though they married in 1994. I know math was my worst subject in school, but this is just ridiculous!
