Snowed In

I am sitting here waiting for the electricity to go out. It's almost lunchtime. We woke up to about an inch of snow, but about 10:00 a.m. it started in again. In Seattle this would be nothing to be concerned about. The plows would be making their rounds and once you got out of your driveway you could probably get to where you wanted to go as long as you stayed away from hills. But around here things aren't as easy. 

The biggest problem are the trees, but almost as bad are the hills. We love trees, and for 11.98 months of the year we celebrate all the trees on our island; it's the small fraction of days like this when they're a threat. Douglas firs were not made to support heavy snow. At the very least their branches collapse, at worst the whole tree topples over.

I'll never forget the snowstorm we had two years ago. It started with a windstorm the night before, knocking out our electricity. (This is a common thing around here and the utility company blames it all on trees. But still, other areas seem to cope with wind despite the trees.) In the morning, the dim prospect of no coffee sent us onto the mainland for breakfast, after a neighbor had cleared away a downed tree on the road with his chain saw. We met other neighbors at the restaurant who'd had the same idea and glancing out the window over our second cup of coffee we noticed a blizzard had started outside & was sticking to the pavement at an unbelievable rate. All we needed was to be snowed in with no electricity, so we sped home as fast as we could, grabbed our overnight bags which we kept packed for just such occasions, locked up and managed to get up the steep end of our driveway to the community road, only to discover another tree had come down over it. This time we tried driving around it and got stuck.

The snow was piling up fast, but David went out to the county road and as luck would have it, a county sheriff's deputy was passing. David flagged him down and the two of them managed to rock the car out of the ditch we'd made trying to get out. While I stood there waiting for him to find someone I could hear the cracking of tree branches that sounded like pistol shots in the snow-muffled silence, and every once in awhile, after the crack a swishing thud that meant a tree had come down somewhere in the woods. By this time I was very anxious to get off the island!

We finally made it, but we had to take several detours because of downed trees over the roads, & all the way off the island we could hear trees falling. I must say I was scared to death one would come down on our car. Four wheel drive vehicles were in ditches all over the place because in weather like that, 4 wheel drive is really no help. We did much better in our front wheel drive Saab.

We were one of the last persons to get a room at a motel on the mainland. Then freezing weather set in and made the roads all but impassable--even the freeways. We were three days in the motel so we made a party of it. The same neighbors we'd eaten breakfast with got a room too, so we had a cocktail party every afternoon and ate at nearby restaurants, all short-handed because employees couldn't get to work.