In praise of being snowed in
By Holly Wren Spaulding
Sun contributor
During the night, trees snapped and limbs crashed around my house, but Saturday was characterized by an uncommon quiet. Even the snowmobilers that regularly race the nearby road were nowhere to be heard. I suppose they too were home digging out from the overnight snowfall — 29 inches in some places, I’m told — and attending to basic survival. In my part of the world, all was white and quiet and very lovely, even if I also knew that the area had sustained real damage from the storm, leaving thousands without heat, with damaged roofs, and roads closed due to tree fall and downed electrical lines.
I kindled a fire in the fireplace, wrapped a shawl around my shoulders, and pulled closer to the flames while the temperature dropped in every other part of the house. I knew I had until about 6:30 p.m. to do anything that required light, so I stayed in my chair, not needing and unable to go anywhere else, but perfectly content with being snowed in. Undistracted by the phone, email or the ability to Google every single curiosity that passed through my consciousness, I did what I most enjoy when I have time to myself: I read and wrote and didn’t move for hours except to stoke the fire. I used my unabridged Webster’s dictionary when I needed to know more about something, and noted how simply good it felt to do one thing at a time, and really concentrate, rather than to toggle between electronic devices in a way that doesn’t really allow me to meaningfully synthesize information.
In the afternoon, I generated inner heat by shoveling, hauling firewood from a distant shed and dragging branches out of the driveway in case plows ever got to me (when they did, a front end loader and chainsaws came first). Surveying the carnage of white pines on the ground, I reflected on the suddenness and timing of this storm, and couldn’t help but think that something is not right with our increasingly erratic weather patterns.
Indoors again, I dipped a cup into a pot of water I’d drawn in anticipation of the power outage and sipped it appreciatively. I missed hot coffee, but was otherwise fine with eating the cold split pea soup a friend had brought for the previous evening’s poetry workshop. I found a kerosene lantern with a last bit of fuel, and was glad to remember how to use such a thing, having grown up on an off-the-grid homestead where it had served as the primary light source. In general, though, back then family life was organized around the natural cycles of light and darkness and was not as dependent on artificial sources.
During those first couple days of the power outage, there was a rare quality and clarity to my thoughts, which was especially gratifying while I worked on a writing project that in other ways was intellectually demanding enough without having to cope with the divided attention that seems the norm for most of us these days. Snow continued to fall, and being alone as I was, a yet deeper degree of inwardness was stirred in me. It felt like a form of meditation to exist in such quiet, for such a sustained period. It’s not just that I wasn’t having conversations with anyone else, but that the noise in my own head was settling down, too. While others may have panicked, I was relieved by the conditions that were imposed on me — much in the same way I appreciate formal constrictions in the composition of a poem or essay.
Of course, there are things about losing power that did put a kink in my routine. The house was becoming smokey from burning marginal wood, although the atmosphere helped me to pretend I was camping as opposed to stranded without heat, water or light. I knew I should expect it to take a while to have electricity restored (I waited seven days), but I had taken stock of the cupboards and knew there was plenty of food to keep me for a while, even if I began to long for a warm meal and hot coffee. Still, I want to be the kind of person who can endure, and even thrive, without the amenities that I’ve become dependent upon, and this was a chance to contemplate that value.
The truth is, during my many Michigan winters, I have only ever been snowed in with at least one other sturdy adult to assist in the shoveling and to keep me company. Now I was alone for this audit of my winter survival skills and after a few days in the cold and dark I began to miss the camaraderie and help of a loved one. It makes sense to combine energies to accomplish what needs doing in these situations, but I think it wasn’t just a practical matter that caused a little melancholy to arise while I was buried. At some primal level, I am vulnerable — we all are — and extreme weather is a reminder of our smallness in the face of real dangers.
With climate change very much on the way, it’s also an incentive to bone up on what will be required of us as fossil energy goes from being temporarily off-line, to more expensive, to scarce or unavailable altogether. Those snow days made me think about having a very small, energy efficient home — one with better systems in place to endure blackouts, and designed to be less dependent on the grid in the first place.
The fact that so many of us went without power for so long, and really did depend on one another for basic things — water, warmth, food, transportation — also made me think about the elegance of families and the generosity of neighbors who begin to take care of one another in new ways when given the opportunity. The other truth is that life is better this way, and as much as I want to be independent, and not burden anyone else with my needs, I don’t really want to live in an “every man for himself” society, either. We are interconnected and it’s nice to be prompted to act like it from time to time.
