Just a little storm...

February 5th-8th, 1978

“...snow...came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss...”

-Dylan Thomas A Child's Christmas in Wales

I've seen this snow, many times in my childhood, but 30 years ago this week, it did not cover our roof with anything like a delicate stippled rime. Snow lay like 30 ton blanket of wool, heavy enough to make the roof groan with the weight of it. The weather men at that time fore-casted a "little storm", hardly anything to worry about...

In 1978 I was nine years old, still shorter than my older brother, but bold in his cast off snow suit and bottle green rubber boots. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First I have to wake up.

And so I did...to muffled silence. It was February 8th. The whistling and banging of the radiator had stopped. The howling and shrieking of the winds from the days and nights before were silent and still. I lay in my bed, gazing out of all five of my windows (I had the gable room, tiny, but well lit...usually) at nothing but white. This wasn't, as you might think, because it was still snowing...it was...but that wasn't the snow I looked out upon. I was staring at the snow that had already fallen...and completely covered the windows from sill to lintel. A dim cold light shone through the top panes of glass, so I knew somewhere up there was the surface of the snow. But damned if I could see it.

I ran down stairs...I wanted to be the first to try the doors. I climbed on the kitchen counter to look out the window over the sink to the driveway. Our car was gone. This was not a small car, but a station wagon. There was no sign of it but a slight rise in the drift...a softly sloped hill that might have just been a whimsy of the wind. Except there was a car somewhere underneath. I crowed with delight and jumped down to the floor as Dad came lumbering up from the cellar, toolbox in tow.

“Look out the back door!” he said with a grin. I opened the inner door and laughed. The storm door was completely snowed in. There was nothing to see through the plexiglass window but the bluey gray of packed snow. Dad calmly set down his tool box and began unscrewing the hinges. Soon, he had peeled away the storm door and a good bit of snow fell into the back entry way. We scooped it into the sink, digging a tunnel through the snow until we broke the surface.

Now this might sound like a tall tale right about now, but I assure you, it isn't. Any one who survived the Great Lakes Blizzard of '77 will be familiar with the images of graveyards of buried cars on the highways, and street signs barely breaking through the top of the snow drifts. Some might say that '78 was a flurry in comparison, but comparisons, as someone once said long ago, are odious. Both years, the National Guard was called in, states of emergency declared, people lost their homes and businesses, people died. On February 6th of 1978, in our neck of the woods, the snow fell and the wind blew for 33 hours, at times at a rate of 4 inches an hour. Throw in some thunder and lightning as well, just for good measure. And some 75 Mph winds. And flooding.

The Blizzard of '78 wasn't just one storm, but a convergence of three that turned into one mother of a nor' easter that dumped (in our town) almost four feet of snow on top of the almost two feet we already had on the ground from the Jan 25^th storm (our little blast of the Great Blizzard of '78 that nailed the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes). In sea side towns, homes were blown off their foundations by hurricane force winds. Other towns were flooded. In Bristol county...in Easton...we got buried. There were drifts of 15 feet reported in some areas. The power was out. For a week. Over a week for others. Mom filled the bathtub with water and brought up our camping equipment...the Coleman stove (we had an electric range...useful for storing water that week), the coolers, the lanterns and candles and flashlights and batteries. We stocked up wood for the fireplace on the front porch. The shovels had been brought in and now that the snow was finally tapering off, we began to dig ourselves out of our house. It took the
better part of the day.

I see pictures of it now but it doesn't match the memories of a four foot something little girl. I don't remember if Dad's head cleared the top of the snow in some places or not. It didn't matter. What did matter was the unbelievably warm memories of one of the coldest times of the year. When we finally dug ourselves out, we met others on the road, their sleds and toboggans and skis making tracks through the flat white expanse where the road used to be. We'd bundled up Michelin man style, and my older brother and I climbed every plow mountain we could find... one that reached almost to the top of the gas station's sign. Do you remember? Did you climb it too? Then we followed the brave souls who'd heard through word of mouth that Fernandez (our local supermarket at the time) had managed to open, so we all set off for a afternoon of it...sleighing and coasting a mile up the road to load up our toboggan with whatever we needed...though I can't remember at all what we could possibly have needed.

Mom and Dad seemed to have everything under control, so we did what New Englanders did best back then...hunkered down. With no electricity, we were, to all intents and purposes, cut off. The only radio station we could get on our transistor was WBZ. We heard sobering reports of people dying in their cars on Route 128. Of flooding in Revere and Hull. Of homes flattened by the wind. We felt grateful, in our cold house, that we had it at all. That we had a fire, and our family and our friends, and our lives. It made us want to enjoy everything we could as if it was the last day we could enjoy it.

Over the next week my brother and I built a rabbit warren of underground tunnels in the front yard. We made snow forts and snow aliens. We came in when we were soaked and dried off before the fire, and played board games. Monopoly, and Scrabble, and Parcheesi, and Mousetrap, and even Candy Land (little sister loved that one). I usually hated board games (except for Scrabble), but somehow, possibly because of the death and destruction the storm had caused, everyone tried to rise above it by being the best possible people they could be (at least in our town...the looters lived somewhere else). There were neighborhood potlucks. Food tasted better, we enjoyed our company as we never had before. There was no pressure. No where to go, no where we had to be. The storm had passed, and we were buried, but we were alive, safe in our iglood house, free of the sadness and worry our parents undoubtedly had, but didn't share. We were free of time, free of concern. The dreadful, wonderful freedom it seems at times only a big storm can give.

Cross-posted at the one and only NE Mamas.
And for a piece of lovely writing about '78, check this out.