I'm sitting here tonight listening to the pouring rain and thinking back to another storm, eight years ago. For me, it was the biggest, baddest storm I've ever experienced. Anytime. Anywhere.
Back then I was living up in the wilds of North Fork on a 7-acre property at the tail end of CDN. If you go as far as you can go, you end up at our driveway, which, except for the gate, appears to be a continuation of the street. We've had a few people come up the driveway thinking they were still on the road . . . much to their eventual surprise (and to ours if they happened to knock on our door). Strangers are few and far between in our neck of the woods.
There are two homes on the property. My friends, Frank and Deb, live in one and I lived in the other, where my daughter, favorite son-in-law and grandson currently reside. In 2001, although there were other homes nearby, they were mostly unoccupied vacation places. I was completely alone on the street and on the property. My neighbors were off in Visalia playing music and the vacationers had enough common sense to stay home. I was there for the long haul, by myself.
The storm was predicted, and the weatherpeople said it would be a doozie. By that time I'd lived up in Cascadel for nearly four years and had seen my share of snow, so I wasn't exceptionally worried. Where we are, people say we are in a "microclimate." Although our true elevation is somewhere around 3,800 ft, we are likely to get snow when it's predicted at 5,000 ft. Up here when you hear there's going to be WEATHER, you lay in provisions, so I did that. I knew I could go a few days without a trip to the store. No problem.
The details have gone a bit sketchy over the years, but I believe the snow started on Friday evening, February 23. What it didn't do is stop. It snowed all of Saturday, February 24, and continued on into Sunday. Big, fat, fluffy, wet, flakes that accumulated with amazing speed. There is a three-foot-high railing around the deck--and before the end of Saturday the snow was up to the top rail. How the deck didn't collapse from the weight, I'll never understand.
Usually when we know we're going to see the white stuff, we park our vehicles down at the bottom of our long driveway, within a stone's throw of the gate, giving us a straight shot at getting out. I think I did that--but with the accumulation, there was no way the car was going to budge in any direction. I was snowed in for the duration.
On Sunday I figured I'd better let Frank and Deb know about the conditions at the homeland. I mainly figured I would just clue them in so they wouldn't try to get up to the house and get stuck. What did they do? THEY CAME HOME. They decided that they did not want me to be on the property alone. Thank heavens they did because the worst was yet to come. I can't remember how far they had to walk, but I know they couldn't get the car up to the gate.
By the time Frank and Deb arrived, the driveway was buried under at least two feet of snow, and I sank into drifts up to my hips going from my kitchen door to the first turn of my driveway. Shoveling wasn't an option. I had to accompany my poor dog outside to take care of business because she'd get into the snow over her head and couldn't find her way back. To make matters even worse, she was a cocker spaniel mix with long fur which clotted with snow. After a time we managed to tromp something of a path for both of us.
It isn't unusual anywhere in the mountains to lose power during a storm. In fact it's almost expected. During the 2001 onslaught, the electricity failed all over the mountain area. For some, the outage lasted a couple of days. For us, it stayed off for a week. At the time the only non-electric appliance I had was a propane water heater. My only heat came from a tiny pot-bellied stove that didn't take wood. It burned twigs. If the house happened to already be warm, it MIGHT keep it that way, otherwise it did virutally nothing to provide heat. (I replaced that stove as quickly as I could afterward.)
No electricity meant no water, other than what we'd stored in bottles in case of an emergency because we needed electricity to operate our pump.
It meant no cooking.
It meant no electric blanket.
It meant COLD.
No computer.
No radio.
No television.
No music.
No bathing.
Storing freezer food outside in the snow.
(But by some miracle I don't think we lost telephone service, so we still could call PG&E every half hour for outage updates. We also called friends, family and work on a daily basis to keep them apprised of our situation.)
What I remember most about that time is the silence. You don't realize how much ambient noise electrical appliances make until they don't. During that time I discovered that I have tinnitus . . . a ringing in the ears. I'd never heard it before, but it's still with me years later.
For a number of years I supported a traditional elder on the Navajo reservation. She lives 15 miles from the nearest trading post over rough roads that wash out in winter. She has no electricty, no running water and no neighbors close by. It's all she's known and the way she prefers to live. I thought a lot about her during the time I was stuck on the property and came to appreciate her resilience. But I also learned to appreciate the raw beauty and simplicity of her way of life.
We survived, obviously, and we were a team. Because Frank and Deb had propane for cooking, they shared candelit meals with me. We spent hours together by their woodstove, and those were special times. We laughed a lot. We shoveled together, once the snow stopped, and we dug the ATV out of the mud more than once. Frank even ended up making a trek down to North Fork for provisions in the ATV--the only vehicle that could negotiate the icy roads.
When the power came back on, we couldn't wait to shower. That's when we discovered that during the power outage our water system developed a problem. After all that time, we still had no water. That didn't get repaired for yet another week.
Could I do it again? Sure.
Do I want to? Not really, and I certainly don't want my family to have to, either. But these experiences happen here in the country. They certainly make me appreciate all the conveniences I have and how much I can do without, if I have to.
I still wouldn't want to live in any other place.
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