Being grateful for what I take for granted, part 4

Lessons:

When I was working as a writer in the public relations office at Drury a zillion years ago they had an awareness week for their budding architecture students about how to design for people with disabilities. I'll never forget that the theme of the program was "TAB" --which stood for "Temporarily Able Bodied." The idea was that eventually we all are handicapped in some way. Most college students are Temporarily Able Bodied in that they have good vision, decent hearing, and can walk, run, jump and go anywhere they have a mind to go. But as architects they needed to be able to envision where someone without the blessings of good health, youth and vitality, might find fault with their design. The students were required to take on a handicap each day of the week for a few hours. They went to class in wheelchairs rather than walking; they wore nearly black sunglasses to eliminate their ability to see clearly; they wore sound-reduction earphones to simulate deafness. All of this was to teach them the lesson of not taking for granted what they were able to do without any difficulty. Obviously the lesson stayed with me as well.

During the ice storm I realized that even though I consider myself a person with fairly low technological expectations (no Wii, no TiVo, or iPhone) the massive, regional loss of power rendered me completely cutoff from everything that made me feel safe. Without electricity to run my computer I couldn't instantaneously check on local weather, road, or emergency conditions. And, I couldn't email friends or family to check on their status, or find ways to improve ours. Without cell phone service we were truly cut off from anyone outside our immediate neighborhood. It was all a huge, tangled Catch-22. If we DID decide to venture out in our car, where could we safely drive? There was no way to know based on our one source of information--the crank radio. If we did get into town the stores were all closed, and besides, what did we need to buy, other than a generator? If we could only call someone outside the area they could look on the internet about options for places we could evacuate to, but we couldn't even make a cell phone call. Our house phone relied on electricity, but even after borrowing our neighbor's regular phone we still couldn't get a call to go through because phone lines were out. And even if we DID get a call to go through I found out days later that the information on the internet about what was going on in this area was sketchy at best.

So I'm initiating the idea that as far as our reliance on modern devices we should all consider ourselves Temporarily Able Bodied. A massive earthquake, another ice storm, or some other disaster--nature made or man-made--could easily leave us in this situation again.

I have already purchased a line-only phone, which came in handy one of the days we had a prolonged power blip. The Reenactor and I have already decided that any home we own in the future will have at the very least a gas-log fireplace, and at the very most, a wood-burning fireplace or stove as well. I am glad we have a propane cook stove, but want to make sure we always have on hand a good supply of the fuel for it. Ditto with C and D batteries. A few more camping lanterns would also be a good thing to store up on, and maybe keep an extra propane cylinder for our outdoor grill. We could do a LOT of cooking on that! Additionally, I realized that as good as my food supply was, it could be improved on. Keeping more rice and beans and canned goods like tomatoes would make it easier to stretch food a lot longer if necessary.

And I pray it won't be necessary.

I have heard many in the local media (and all you regular readers know how much I love the local media) compare this event to Hurricane Katrina. Sorry you idiots, but this is not like Katrina. First of all, thousands of people didn't drown in the ice. Sadly, some 30 or people have died as a result of this storm in this state, but that isn't comparable to what happened in New Orleans. We lost trees, and in a few cases homes have been damaged by falling limbs, but entire neighborhoods have not been destroyed by this. There is certainly a lot of cleanup work left to be done, and this area will look damaged for a couple of years from the effects of the ice to the trees, but we don't have huge blooms of mold climbing up our living room walls. And even though communications were difficult for a few days there aren't families having to try to locate one another through the Red Cross because of this.

As of the Friday morning that I'm writing this there are still hundreds of people without power...three full weeks later. This isn't the fault of the hundreds of linemen working around the clock. It is just simple logistics. There are areas where getting a line up on the poles again requires that a special machine be brought in to cut through an entire woods' worth of tangled limbs. It looks like a giant weed wacker attached to a cherry picker arm on a large tractor. The fact that our neighborhood got re-electrified so early was incredible. The two subdivisions immediately to our north didn't have power for two full weeks because they were on a different central line than we were. In town there were many instances where one side of a street had power restored within a couple of days..the other side waited weeks. To restate something I wrote in the first post about this, the electric grid took 70 years to build, and just hours to destroy. People can't expect it to be completely rebuilt in a few weeks.

But the lack of power doesn't equate to the aftereffects of a Cat 4 hurricane. It also doesn't equate to the towns in Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri that have been completely wiped out by tornadoes in recent years. When put into perspective this ice storm was a nuisance, and a huge inconvenience for most of us, and ultimately will be an expensive thing to clean up from, both for the city and county, and for individuals. But it wasn't a crisis on the scale of Katrina.

The happier lesson of all this is that we truly are a community. Three different families living in our subdivision offered us shelter in their gas-log-warmed homes. Another neighbor offered us the use of his kitchen, and any food he had in it when he left town. Two friends risked injury driving ten miles out to our house in the dark on the third night to let us know we could go to a house with heat and light. Our friends who left for vacation in New York were amazing in their generosity to open their home to people without power. Within our church community we began calling on one another as soon as we had phone service, and in many cases drove by the homes of elderly or ill church members to personally check on them. And as you drive around this area some three weeks later the amazing thing is that even though there are homes with significant tree damage still in their front yards, MOST homes have been picked up...at least to the point that volunteers and neighbors can do it. The Reenactor and I have been part of that volunteer work, but the fact is apparent that many, many, many people have been out helping their neighbors and strangers. The lesson learned in the aftermath of Katrina is that the government is not our savior after an event like this...we must rely on each other in our community to restore and rebuild. FEMA might take care of a few of the big things (debris removal?) but we must first get it to the curb.

The other happy lesson is that we came through all this with stories. Our kids will remember the Big Ice Storm. They will remember eating by candlelight, steam rising into the cold kitchen air above their bowls of hot pasta and fish stew. They will remember sitting at the kitchen table, dressed in fleece hats, gloves, and coats playing endless rounds of Monopoly (the kid version, not the grownup!), Sorry!, and Go Fish. They will remember using every blanket we had in the house to create warm cocoons to sleep in, and using camping lanterns to read their books before bedtime. They'll remember helping us listen to the radio by cranking the handle on the side. They'll remember the sounds of the trees breaking and crashing. And they'll remember the lovely warmth and comfort of the Price Ice Rescue House.

The Reenactor and I both felt confident from the beginning that with our camping gear and hillbilly common sense we could make it through this event. And ultimately we did. We came through it with a greater appreciation for daily luxuries...like CNN at the flick of a button on the remote. Like picking up a little plastic box smaller than a deck of cards and making a call to let the other know we're running late. Like being warm..right now....just by pressing a button on the wall. The reality is as human beings we don't actually NEED any of those things to survive....our great grandfathers did fine without any of it. They are luxuries, and at any given moment they are temporarily here. I think our lesson is to be better prepared for when they are temporarily not here from now on.

One more installment to come...