Remembering '93

The temperature dropped down to zero this morning - more accurately, 0.9 Fahrenheit - and I am sure it is well below that in Highlands, which is usually about 8 degrees colder during the winter.  The elevation here is about 2650, and on Main Street in Highlands it is 3850 (contrary to the new "Wayfinding Signs" which perpetuate the fictional 4118).

When it drops to zero and below, the natural world changes in unexpected ways.  In the woods, branches become brittle, and bizarre white flowers of ice expand and push out of the ground, snapping and crunching as you walk along.  The tree house near the back door that I built for Katy twenty years ago and which is connected to two trees pops and snaps in the lightest breeze.  Even walking on the deck is a new experience as it makes little creaking sounds, like I would imagine the masts make on an old sailing ship.

These frigid temperatures have not been seen here in many years, and it reminds me of the Blizzard of '93, which struck Highlands on March 12-13 that year.  That storm was unexpected (I wonder if modern meteorology would predict it today), and Martha was visiting her grandmother in Raleigh at the time with our only four-wheel-drive vehicle, so six-year-old Katy and I were stranded with our Honda Prelude, without power for two or three days.  What a wonderful time that was!  The wild wind blew the trees dizzyingly around our house, and some of them came down.  We had plenty of firewood and we kept the woodstove (fireplace insert) going 24/7, stacking snow-covered wood all around the stone hearth so that it could dry enough to burn, and pulling the sofa up close at night to sleep, waking every hour or two to feed the fire.  We ate almost the entire box of chocolate powerbars in the pantry, as I remember it, and heated up soup on the little propane stove.  For years afterward, Katy and I would celebrate March 13 with a Blizzard Party, re-enacting those resourceful days by cutting off the main breaker on the electrical panel and eating power bars in front of the fireplace.  We would turn on that little Mickey Mouse radio, purchased on some trip to Disney World - our only source of news of the outside world, a radio station in South Carolina:  about 1100 AM on Mickey's left ear.

The weather instruments on the wall to our bedroom still carry that penciled date next to the barometer, just below 28.5 - an arbitrary number, since I simply have the barometer's needle set midway on the dial at the "Change" position because of the low barometric pressure in these mountain, but a point below which that needle has never gone since, during any kind of weather.

And I don't think it's been that cold, either, since 1993.