The ice storm

Bits of ice were steadily hitting the ground when he finally parked the car. He sighed and blew air out forcefully from between his lips. It had been a long drive home through typical rush hour madness made even more insane by the advent of the storm. He turned off the headlights, wipers and engine, removed his key from the ignition, and for the very first time since he left work almost two hours before he could hear the incessant clicking of the ice as it pelted the car.

"I thought it was just rain," he thought. "I've got to stop rocking out to Simon and Garfunkel."

At four the next morning the power went out. His eyes popped open when the air cleaner near his bed was suddenly silenced. The battery power supplies attached to electronics throughout the house began to take turns beeping every 30 seconds, with one starting soon after another had stopped.

"Oh, no," he whispered quietly from under the warmth of the covers.

He rolled over and pulled the covers tightly against him, trying to decide if he should get up and deal with the beeping. He didn't want to. But after a minute he knew he had to. So he threw the covers off in frustration, hopped out of bed and stomped over to turn off the beeping demon in the bedroom, knowing that the stupid time display in the stupid DVD burner would have to be stupidly set again once the stupid power returned in its own stupid time.

Without being able to make out the words, he heard his wife and son talking in the other room. His snoring had caused her to seek refuge on the living room couch again. He opened the bedroom door.

"I think we've had a power failure," he called out sleepily.

"Yes," his wife replied.

"I need to turn off those power supplies," he said.

"They just now turned themselves off," she said.

 "They ran out of power and turned themselves off," his son said.

"OK," he said. "Good. Let's go back to sleep and deal with this later."

"OK," they said.

Knowing that he had many more hours of potentially award-winning snoring time ahead of him, he didn't bother asking his wife about returning to the bedroom. Instead, he closed the bedroom door quietly behind him and curled back under the covers in a fetal position, trying to keep warm as the house began to cool. It was 30 degrees and dropping outside, and the sleet continued to fall through the night and into the next day.

The dawn seemed to arrive reluctantly, as if it wanted to be wherever it was warm, and this was not it. His clock radio was murmuring behind his head as he came awake. Voices talking about the death of Nelson Mandela. He listened for awhile with his eyes closed and his head propped against his pillow, feeling sad.

"There seem to be so few truly good people left in this world," he thought morosely, before he told himself that that wasn't really true and to snap out of it and get ready for the day.

The power had been out for a few hours now, and the bedroom was much colder than before. He often thought that the geniuses who built his house must have taken a certain amount of special pride in their unmatched ability to design a bedroom that would be unbearably hot every summer and freezing cold every winter. Now that the power was out, it was colder than ever. He opened his mouth wide and went "huuuhhh" with his breath. He thought he could see it. He shivered, despite the warm covers.

Later, after he had washed and dressed in warm clothes, he put on his beige ball cap because he had heard that most of your body heat is lost through your head. It seemed silly that a thin ball cap could help anyone retain that much heat, but it was all he had to work with, other than to try and strap a couple of his cats to his head, and based upon prior experience he knew that that might not work out so well.

When he left the bedroom his wife and kids were already up and opening the blinds to try and brighten up the house. His wife had brought in some small stacks of wood that they had purchased from a grocery store about a year before.

"We need to start a fire in the fireplace," she said. "It's getting cold in here."

"OK," he said. And he did, even though some of the wood was a bit wet from the storm. Luckily they had a gas fireplace, and soon the living room became more livable.

And then all of the smoke alarms throughout the house went off as one. Each of them held their hands to their ears as the smoke alarms screeched like seven thrashing and disheveled people in strait jackets lined up in a hall of padded cells in an insane asylum. He had changed the smoke alarm batteries only a few days before. This had the potential to go on for awhile.

"Did you open the flue?" his wife yelled.

"Yes!" he replied, although he rushed over with a flashlight to make sure it was open. It was.

"Do something!" screamed his wife.

"Get it to stop!" screamed his daughter.

"I kinda like it," laughed  his son.

So he ran outside and slip-slided on the ice to the backyard shed where he got his step ladder so he could reach the smoke alarms and pull the batteries that were giving each of the circular screaming demons life. And soon the last battery was pulled and the banshees were reluctantly silenced. Peace reigned. They all breathed a simultaneous sigh of relief.

  

A short while later he went outside to the front of the house to try and uncover his car that was now completely encased in a thick and unyielding pile of ice. 

"I swear there's a car in here," he thought uncertainly as he chipped and chopped at the ice. He hadn't been able to find his regular gloves, so he wore some soiled work gloves he had found in the shed. They were practically useless for this purpose and were soon soaked through and cold, just like the rest of  him. Although he had been digging now for 45 minutes, he still couldn't determine if he was any closer to discovering his car.

The front door flew open and his son stood there.

"Dad!" he yelled. "The power came back on and the smoke alarms are going off again! What should we do?"

"Ask your mother to turn off the power to them at the circuit box!" he yelled back as he dug at the ice. "The circuit box is marked, so you can tell which one to shut off!"

As his son ducked back inside the house, he dug some more and finally broke through to the car below.

"Eureka!" he shouted in triumph. "I have found it! I laugh at your silly ice storm, Mother Nature! Is this the worst you can do? Nothing can stop me! I laugh at your power!"

A sudden gust of wind blew a spray of ice crystals into his face and down his throat, giving him an uncontrollable coughing fit. When he recovered, he wiped his eyes and decided it might be best to retreat back inside for awhile.

With the power back on, he turned off the gas at the fireplace, and once the embers had grown cold, he closed up the flue and hesitantly flipped the switch that powered the smoke alarms. There was a chorus of chirping, and then blessed silence. He replaced the batteries and quietly prayed to the gods of nature he had mocked just a short time before that there would be no more power failures.

As the week wore on, the ice reluctantly retreated, with piles of white giving way to piles of brown. Eventually, only thin patches of ice hiding in shadows gave testament to the power of the storm.

He and his daughter were watching a quiet movie together as his brother-in-law who lived with them went outside to put something in the trash. As he came back inside, a strong gust of wind blew into the house, carrying with it faint traces of smoke from a neighbor's fireplace.

The smoke alarms sniffed it, thought briefly about letting it pass, and then started their incessant ear-splitting scream.

"Make it stop!" his daughter cried.

"I'm trying!" he yelled, as he ran to the shed to get his step ladder.