Category: weather

Ice Storm 2016

phone import 25 october 2018 906

Waiting

The storm was stalking before it hit, at least a week, if one looked to notice. It was lurking. It was lying in wait and testing. December ended with tires spitting grit off the pavement and howls of chainsaws shredding the thin winter light.

I was called for jury duty December 6th.  A pool of 300 jurors was ordered to report Tuesday morning. Freezing rain was forecast. My number was 286. I packed a bag as though traveling overnight, in reality, sequestered in a dim basement room lined with hard plastic chairs. I joined my peers in the American justice system, a jury pool brought and bound together by randomly drawn voter registration and driving records. Wet coats and hats dripped and puddled on the linoleum soaked from the rain slashing outside bordering on sleet. The room smelled of steam and hair. We slouched in tight rows and watched a video on the workings of the court and our responsibilities as jurors. I took out my book and ate the chicken sandwich I packed. Then we waited. This was the true beginning of the storm: waiting in the basement on hard plastic chairs to be called.

[The following week were we caught unaware? Weren’t we distracted with the coming holidays, by menorah candles, Christmas trees, Kwanzaa corn, boughs and swag, desolate and uninspired over gift lists and grocery lists, how much to tip the newspaper carrier? There was time to snap the torpor, remember the daily ritual of the advent calendar, find gifts and wrap them—festively!—time aplenty to stir walnut fudge. The weather sites posted banner advisories with backgrounds shifting from orange to red trying to flag our failing attention:  pay attention, notice how dark the days, notice the stealthling cold.]

On Wednesday the 14th, it started to rain. The rain froze. The ice took hold of the trees by branch and stem. Limbs and twigs grew great ice fangs and claws. Fir trees sank. Birches bent and broke. Oaks split from their roots. Trees toppled under the weight of the ice to rip down power lines and crash through roofs and automobiles. Branches succumbed to the great weight and were rent, only to be caught and cemented in ice to their fellows. That night we watched over Amazon Creek basin as transformers exploded and power lines snapped surges of orange and white flame. The sound of exploding trees was an artillery report. The city lost power. We went to bed.

I woke in the dark and silence. I woke because of the darkness and silence. The power was out. The clock was dark. I listened to the cold. For a few moments, the power came back, then another explosion, very close. Everything went black. The dog leaned against the bed and nuzzled. I whispered in her ear. We went back to sleep.

We had no power for days. We had no heat. We kept the wood fire burning to hold a center of warmth, a bunker from which to huddle against the cold. We set up the propane camp stove outside to boil water and brew coffee. I inventoried the candles scattered around the house and set them out on the borders of our bunker next to the wood stove. The south hills were dark and silent.

There is the elasticity of waiting. There is the tedium of the cold and the strain of darkness. What are we, without light, without heat?

Ice

Day did not break on Thursday. Ice shrouded the trees and grass, decks and steps, cars and sidewalks. Dawn brought a day of vaguely lighter shades of gray, bounded in a snow globe of freezing fog. There was not enough light through the southern windows to read at midday. It was Jack-the-Ripper-weather to seize you by the throat and probe below the clavicle sheltering your heart. The fog magnified and conducted the cold emanating from the ice. Power lines and fallen trees blocked roads, limbs continued to succumb and split from their trunks. The public was advised to stay home, stay off the streets. We stoked the wood stove. We conserved the battery charge in our phones.

700 years ago, in exile from Florence, Dante wandered a dark wood. He was confronted by three savage beasts. “The Divine Comedy” is the original metaphysical guidebook, comprised of 100 cantos, leading from the dark wood into the depths of hell. The tourist must pass through Satan’s navel into purgatory to finally ascend to heaven.

It is the first book, “The Inferno,” that still tempts our distracted modern minds. The enduring human impulse to gape at suffering and torture, an inherent voyeurism mesmerized by the agony of others, ensures The Inferno will never be quaint. What interest does the present world have for the painful trudge laboring up the purging mountain, expiating sin over millennium? Or the blandishments of never-ending glory before God, the smallest possible perfect circle?

There are nine rings of hell, spiraling and descending according to the gravity of the sin, each featuring a torture uniquely tailored to the transgression against God. Poetic justice is the theme of this Comedy. In the very pit of the Inferno, sinners are imprisoned in solid ice up to the neck. This is the realm of traitors: those who betrayed when trusted most. Dante believed that eternally burning by ice was the harshest punishment possible, greater than any torments of fire. With these sinners imprisoned in the paralyzing cold, Dante watches Virgil kick at the frozen heads as they pass. I’ve forgotten much, but not the boot heel striking the frozen chin.

Our text was laid out on facing pages: Italian on the left and English on the right. Professorio instructed the intimate seminar. Though small in stature, he was a man of large and lavish gesture. As we stumbled through the Italian, he conducted with great flourish to keep the proper cadence. A professor of Romance Languages, he was in fact a Greek from Rhodes, though an Italian scholar. Twice each week we trudged along with Virgil and the rookie Dante, our fellow apprentice in this exploration of the cosmos. At the bottom of the bottom of the pit, Satan was bound in ice forever.

The McKenzie River claims the watershed down from Mount Washington, through Clear Lake, into the Willamette Valley. In December, the river is full and furious, trimmed with rime. The torrent grinds out agates from the mountain rock and sweeps them downstream. Ice edges the banks daring the water crashing over slick black rock. In my memory, it was December. I remember thinking how dark the water would be, how snow would define the banks.

Why a proud man would be so desperate to choose the black water of this river, I have pondered for many years. Professorio, a man who conducted the torment of the ninth ring of hell, leapt in to that inferno, weighted with metal chains, to be sucked down into an icy maelstrom forever.

I stoke the fire as night falls, wait and watch the flames. There is nothing else to do.

 

 

Stone Willow

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Janus is a Roman two-faced god. He looks backward upon the path traversed whilst surveying the shrouded future, a guardian of gateways and thresholds for whom this month is named.  It’s a long climb up from the bottom. The mountain goat’s hooves spark striking stone hoisting a coiled serpent tail from the black waters of late December. Twenty-one days have passed since the sun stood still at solstice.

The dog and I go out in the morning seeking, in fog, in rain, in frost. We search for tracks and signs, delimit fleeting clouds, eavesdrop on the crows gossiping between the fir and the oak. Walking in the rain down the steep hill to the park before Christmas Eve, I slipped on wet leaves and pine needles. I stumbled to the pavement, falling down to one knee and the heel of my right hand. We finished our tour, Mercy’s leash loose in my left hand, and came home. I bound up the wrist in an Ace bandage to support and immobilize it. Each day it improves, but there is a click inside now close to the bone that reminds me I am not young.

The new is waiting tightly as the old falls away. Last year’s leaves lie sodden against fences and curbs, spinning slowly away in the rain showers, down the hill.  Today we saw willow buds beginning to crack their pods and green tips of daffodil and crocus jaunty in the mud. Exhale now. The light returns.

Solstice | 2:23 PM December 21, 2018

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The winter solstice is the moment the sun halts its southern descent and hangs holding the horizon on the Tropic of Capricorn, the place of the fish-tailed goat. The word solstice, a noun, derives from Latin and means simply the Sun stands still and there she lingers. Located halfway between the equator and North Pole on the 44th parallel, southern declination is sharp. By Christmas Day, the sun climbs north by an astronomical minute, a fraction of a degree.

To Juan at the Winter Solstice

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There is one story and one story only
That will prove worth your telling,
Whether as learned bard or gifted child;
To it all lines or lesser gauds belong
That startle with their shining
Such common stories as they stray into.

Is it of trees you tell, their months and virtues,
Or strange beasts that beset you,
Of birds that croak at you the Triple will?
Or of the Zodiac and how slow it turns
Below the Boreal Crown,
Prison to all true kings that ever reigned?

Water to water, ark again to ark,
From woman back to woman:
So each new victim treads unfalteringly
The never altered circuit of his fate,
Bringing twelve peers as witness
Both to his starry rise and starry fall.

Or is it of the Virgin’s silver beauty,
All fish below the thighs?
She in her left hand bears a leafy quince;
When, with her right hand she crooks a finger, smiling,
How many the King hold back?
Royally then he barters life for love.

Or of the undying snake from chaos hatched,
Whose coils contain the ocean,
Into whose chops with naked sword he springs,
Then in black water, tangled by the reeds,
Battles three days and nights,
To be spewed up beside her scalloped shore?

Much snow is falling, winds roar hollowly,
The owl hoots from the elder,
Fear in your heart cries to the loving-cup:
Sorrow to sorrow as the sparks fly upward.
The log groans and confesses:
There is one story and one story only.

Dwell on her graciousness, dwell on her smiling,
Do not forget what flowers
The great boar trampled down in ivy time.
Her brow was creamy as the crested wave,
Her sea-blue eyes were wild
But nothing promised that is not performed.

–Robert Graves

Advent

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The winter rains finally arrived on Thanksgiving with the full moon. Rain slanted sideways blowing in sheets, gusts bowed the trees and swung the long metal chords of the wind chimes to smash against the southern plate window. This is the hard cold rain that smells of snow, the hard gray sky indistinguishable from the black streaming streets, dark shadows of fir standing sentry. The sun’s gone south. The moon is waning.

American Thanksgiving is observed on the fourth Thursday in November. In English, Thursday derives from “Thor’s Day,” the day of thunder in German and Old English, Jupiter (or Jove’s) day in Latin, with ancient Greeks naming it hemera Dios, the day of Zeus. (The Hindi name for Thursday is Guruwar, which might be related to the god Vishnu, but I will withhold further presumption as I actually don’t have a clue.)

Thursday, the day of the sky god, a day of feasting and football. Zeus rules  Thunder, Lightning, Weather, Air, Eagle, Bull, Oak, Olive, Lion and Wolf.

The Thanksgiving morning newspaper was slight compared to the newsprint that arrived inside: flyers and inserts advertising Black Friday sales and stores that would open at 2 PM.

The Dallas Cowboys always play a football game on Thanksgiving. Their symbol is a star.  I was there on Thanksgiving once, in Cowboy stadium (now renamed AT&T) to watch the Cowboys play the Seattle Seahawks, the closest thing I have to a home pro-football team.

When I walked Dad’s dog, Ben, Saturday-after-Thanksgiving through the affluent yet middle-class streets I grew up in, women strode through their yards inflating Christmas figures arranged on the front lawns, frowning as they hung strings of lights in shrubs. Men balanced on ladders and cursed enthusiastically. Ben growled at the life-size effigies of Swiss Mountain dogs in Santa hats as we passed. I wondered if the giant Frosty the Snowman figure would be exhausted and deflated by solstice. Thanksgiving came early this year.

I finally sorted through the last remnants of food from Thanksgiving week today: whipped cream languishing next to a blackened half-avocado, wild rice forgotten in a yogurt container, bits of local Chanterelles fermenting now in clotted cream and cold pappardelle. Advent begins December 2nd.

I watched a flock of wild turkeys spar as they pecked at windfall apples in the road.

It’s dark when I get up. This morning it was too early, too dark. Mercy squeezes under the bed to sleep. She sings like a whale sometimes when she wants me to get up; perhaps this morning she was merely dreaming. She stole my flannel robe from the foot of the bed and I had to parley a bit of chicken jerky for its safe return.

The kitchen lights above the stove warm a sheltered circle. I catch slivers of my reflection in the window as I give the dog her breakfast and drink my juice. The tea kettle I’d cleaned before Sunday’s dinner party is splattered again with last night’s sauteing. It is the kettle, I think, the kettle I miss most before I leave.