Surviving Winter's Worst

I grew up in a subdivision outside a small town in east central Illinois.  It was far enough outside of civilization to feel fairly isolated when winter’s nasty weather reared its ugly head.  It seemed to snow a lot more in the 70s and 80s than it does now, and I remember my mom taking photographs of 10 and 15-foot drifts lining the country road leading to the smaller road I lived on.  The wind from the west was unstoppable, and it seemed strange that snow fences lined the north-south road to break the drifting force and create mountains of the white stuff right on the road.  (It would not have been my strategy for preserving the precious topsoil, but I had little say in the matter.)  Schools closed often in winter during these years, and if the plow didn’t come through, or only came through on the main road, there was no way for us at our little dead-end to get out.  Often we were stranded there for two or three days at a time.

My parents were children of the Great Depression, and had always kept a garden; even when they both had full-time jobs, they canned and froze vast quantities of food during the growing season.  My mother planned a sizable pantry when we built our house, and it was always full of home-canned and store-bought dry goods.  We also had a large refrigerator with freezer, and a separate chest freezer sitting next to it.  We had a gas stove that could still be lit if the power went out, and a fireplace with a large supply of cut wood ready at all times.  We always had thermoses of fresh water filled and at the ready.  My mother could have prepared a feast for 20 with her four-burner stove and her garden preserves.  We were survivalists.

According to State of Illinois records: “The Midwest, including Illinois, experienced in 1977-1978 its most severe winter since weather records began in the early Nineteenth Century. Illinois had a record-breaking number of 18 severe winter storms; 4 such storms is normal. The record winter began with 3 snowstorms in late November and ended with an extremely damaging ice storm in late March. Unusual snow patterns occurred with several storms and they lasted much longer than usual.”  Yep. Easter Sunday 1978, there was an ice storm to beat all.  During the night we listened to the orchestra of the crash and bang of tree branches freezing, breaking and toppling with the weight of the ice.  Sunday morning we awoke to a world encased in ice—incredibly beautiful, but crippling.  Our driveway, the road, everything was covered in a two-inch-thick layer of perfectly clear ice, at times brilliantly reflecting and magnifying the timid spring sun.  The power had gone out in the middle of the night, and would not come back on for a week.  We had a well, so when the power was out, the pump didn’t work.  That meant hauling water up from the river at the edge of our property to flush the toilets.  

But we had food!  My mother and father rolled the chest freezer out onto the porch to keep the food cold, and we did our best to cook and consume the fresh food in the refrigerator before delving into the canned goods.  Fortunately, my mother had prepared a good deal of Easter dinner beforehand, so she heated things on the stove, and we ate like kings.  We closed off the living room by hanging tarps, and hauled in pillows, blankets, and all our favorite books, some board games, and a couple of decks of cards.  We played music on the piano.  We sang, we listened to the transistor radio.  To my 11-year-old self it was magical—camping in your own house!  Having a gas stove meant that we could still pop popcorn, make toast with a piece of bread stuck onto a fork, make chili, make spaghetti; even better, we could drink orange soda at every meal, since we were reserving water, and we ran out of milk!  After seven days of no electricity, my dad decided it was time to hook up his old and questionable gas-powered generator.  It took him several tries to get the thing started, and some time to figure out the weird configurations for which circuits could be powered, but finally the refrigerator roared to life and the clock in the kitchen started ticking again.  As luck would have it, thirty minutes later all the lights in the hallway went on too; electricity had been restored to our neighborhood.

Although it was incredibly fun, something from that experience must have stuck in the back of my mind and unsettled me to this day.  Every time there’s a winter storm in the forecast, the first thing I think about is having enough food in the pantry.  Year-round, I have become a bit of a food hoarder.  In our current house, we live about a 15-minute walk to a grocery store.  I can count the number of times on one hand our power has been cut off in the nine years we’ve lived here, and never for more than a couple of hours. And yet, I can’t help but picture what we would do if we were stranded here without power for a week.  I’m happy that we heat our house with a wood stove, with at least a year’s worth of reserve of cut wood ready; it makes me more comfortable to know that we’ll be warm. 

Our source of heat

My chest freezers are full of bread, vegetables, fruits, and meat.  Our basement is cool enough to become an emergency refrigerator, as long as the outside temperature stays cold.  We have city water, so we can still flush our toilets.

I’m ready for that huge snowfall, sky.  Bring it.