Siting at my computer in my attic office I look out over the snowy
slough below a strip of golden fluff
left over from durham harvest mixed with patches of snow beyond which lies the
grove of leafless trees on a bluff to the west of the almost invisible red barn. My fingers tingle
just a bit in the cold. The temperatures
today never quite made it above freezing, but the wind forgot to blow.
Prediction from NOAA for the next couple of days includes the arrival
of an Alberta Express. The line on the
map that delineates the border between Canada and the USA impresses my mind so that
somehow the weather follows the 49th parallel.
Of course, it doesn’t. But as always what one thinks is far more
important than any fact floating through the intellectualsphere. Of course ,the weather to the north will be
more exciting, less forgiving, and always colder, wetter, and more deadly than
the weather on this side of the border.
In fact, it is the Rockies,
Canadian and American, that really affect the storms that make it into our
little corner of the prairie. Hardly a
corner, our land encompass over a thousand square miles of short grass prarie
over which weather moves along ancient
patterns established by warm air rising from the Gulf of Mexico two thousand
miles south to mix with arctic billows sliding across The Gulf of Alaska
through the various canyons of the Rockies out onto the plains.
All we can do is cope with
whatever the eddies far out in the southern or northern oceans leapfrog into our
atmosphere. We dress warm in winter and
undress more by more in summer but we always allow for the winds that cool by
myriad degrees in winter and by ever so slight degrees in summer.
The worst storms in over
twenty-five years lingered in our own half acre in the winter of 2010-2011. The rain storms of spring 2011 filled the slough to within twenty feet of
the house. Sump pumps worked 24/7 to
empty the ground beneath basements.
During spring planting, farmers in
the cabs of behemoths of the industry slid down into wind rows, stuck four or
five feet into the clay bottoms beneath the four inches of topsoil. No vehicles could pull them out. Patience was the mantra of the day.
And then on 1 May the warmth
disappeared and a giantic storm rolled in off the Gulf of Alaska dropping vast numbers
of feet of snow on mountain tops and still had enough moisture when it met the
uplifting Gulf of California stream to drop
four feet of snow and winds up to ninety miles per hour on our land.
There we sat suddenly with no
electricity. The wet ground followed by
the extreme wind conditions in the pulsating storm pulled the electricity poles loose like a
seven year old loosing a front tooth.
The ground was so soggy that the
huge electrical line equipment bogged as soon as they left the roadside. Seventy
heavy duty repair vehicles lay stranded up to their knees in mud surrounded by
puddles of water on which mallards mildly ducked beneath the surface to feed
and Canada geese preened on the upper quarter of huge wheel wells watching ‘manunkind’
attempt to repair what they could not reach.
And we? We hooked up the propane heater to keep warm,
kept the refrigerator door closed so that milk would not sour any faster than
it might. We pulled out the jig saw
puzzles, moved furniture so that the table top was close to the bay window and
used the white cloud cover to illuminate the puzzle pieces as we gossiped about
the worst winter we could ever remember living through.
The Australian had stories of
Nepal where he had climbed some of the world’s highest peaks. Bart, who had been born in Manley, told
stories of widowed women who walked thirteen miles through snow drifts with a plucked roaster in hand to visit
neighbors who lived in shanty shacks buried under sod roofs at the turn of the
last century. I remembered the ice
storms of the late 1940s in the lower peninsula of Michigan when we were not
allowed to go out of doors for fear of huge tree branches cracking and
dropping.
There was the story of the little
second grader who wanted so much to be part of the social group with whom she
sat in class in the midst of spring thaw. In the playground she tried to be
part of the group as they forced her to stand in the middle of a March stream
at the back of the playground. There she
stood with the water just almost leaking in over the tops of her rubber boot
tops.
When the bell rang, the others who
had held her captive in her icy prison ran to the classroom. She gingerly tiptoed back to the bank of the
small stream and immediately told the older children in her four room school
house.
The perpetrators found themselves
in identical situations during recess the next day.
The second grader had learned a
lesson. Suffering in silence was not an
option. Seeking out the support of
older, wiser, more powerful persons paid off.
And the gift of gab was an essential tool in restitution.
In the midst of our evening stone
soup made from contributions from several households in town on our propane
stove top, we all commiserated, drank the last bottle of wine in the house and
when everyone left for home, we turned off the heater to save on fuel and
snuggled into the down covers to keep warm.
Five days later, Montana/Dakota
Utilities figured out how to lay lines just above the surface of the wetlands
and electricity was restored.
But this was only the last of
several stories told during this most stormy winter in twenty-five years in
northern Montana.