Foggy New Year’s Day, our dilapidated woodpile in distance. The neighbour’s one to the right is so large it is kept under a large tempo tent.
It’s January 1, 2011 and it’s warm, way above 0 degrees Celcius anyway. The weather has been wacky all over the world, except for our corner, where we have been spared our normal snowy December. If it continues, I will be happy, except I don’t want any ice storms.
We still haven’t got around to installing that wood burning stove. Every Autumn we investigate what’s available out there and then decide not to install one. I’m the culprit. I know we’ll never use it as my husband gets migraines from wood smoke. It’s a JUST-IN-CASE purchase. Just in case there’s another ice storm like in 1998.
Our fireplace is a giant hole to nowwhere.
I could find no pictures of the icestorm in our collection; that’s probably because we were too busy panicking to take some.
We lived in a bungalow with a working fireplace, but it gave off no heat. We travelled, back and forth, kids and dog and adults, to our in-laws and then to my mother’s apartment in the city, wherever we could find a little heat. One morning I was the only driver on the T Can in Pointe-Claire, what a nut!
I remember carrying my 45 pound poodle up 10 flights in the stairwell in my mom’s apartment in Montreal West End, as dogs were not allowed in the building. And back down again, to poop. The poor animal was afraid of the stairs. Once on land, she couldn’t get a foothold to do her business, sliding all over the place, legs splayed. (She’s still alive, but very very old and can barely stand, but from old age.)
Our present house is heated electrically. We don’t have a generator either. I guess we could use the bbq, but heat’s the important thing in winter.
The only reason more people didn’t die in the ice storm(one of the few deaths was a woman in the adjacent town who raised prize winning Standard Poodles: she died amidst her dogs)was because it stayed warm after the grid went down. That is most unusual.
Anyway, I write this the day after reading a piece on Salon.com about the actor Ashton Kutcher, who supposedly keeps himself in great shape, but not to look sexy in movies, but to protect his family when the bad times come. Or so he supposedly said in an interview with another magazine.
Well, I suspect from my experience with the great ice storm of 1998, that brawn won’t be of much use in such times; brains will be. But not the abstract knowledge of our ‘new knowledge economy’. No. Practical knowledge. My high school drop out of a brother-in-law was a life saver (almost literally) during the ice storm. He managed to rig an old generator and brought it around to house to house, plugging it without proper transfer switch into the electrical system, so people could shower and the houses could heat up.
My husband was pretty useful too. (He’s good with his hands. He was a Scout.) But he works in TV News and in crises, the News must go on. So he wasn’t around that much.
(I’m useless in crises, being the kind of person who lives inside her head.I actually awoke one morning during the storm, my heart pounding (panick attack). But I wasn’t worried for me. I was worried for my children and my dogs. Later, I my friends with wood stoves told me how much fun they had had, “like camping out”.)
Anyway, I’ve heard that in places like Cuba, where they have learned to do a lot with little, there are plenty of resourceful people.
We’ve all been deskilled, EVERYBODY and that’s the material point. Consumer societies, well, capitalist societies, grow powerful by de-skilling the population.
This Flo in The City blog chronicles the de-skilling of the middle-class since the 1900′s. Margaret Nicholson was a maestro at the wood burning stove, baking scones from whatever flour was cheapest and savory stews from inexpensive cuts of beef, and I write about it in the book. (And she wasn’t as resourcesful as her mother, who had been born on poverty-stricken Isle of Lewis.)
Margaret cooked from recipes safely filed in her head; her daugher Marion used the Fanny Farmer Cookbook. Marion’s daughter, Marion Hope, fed her family on canned food in the 60′s. Even canned potatoes! My husband hardly ate a fresh veggie as a child.
Today, many young people can’t use a regular stove, they only can microwave ready-made meals. Or order out. My son works part-time as a chef at a high end restaurant, and he and his girlfriend ordered out, pizza, every day during exam time. No time to cook, even with the know-how.
Heating a home was of critical importance in 1900. Norman Nicholson is always so worried about his family getting wood to heat the house. Flora is always bragging about how she fed the stove herself.
Wood for heat was a major expense, too. I have the bills. As it is today.
No, I suspect that in bad times, people who can afford it will just take off to safer environs, like some of the elite French took off to Nice in 1940.
Now, they’ve strengthened the electrical transmission towers, the ones that collapsed like dominoes in 1998. They look like broad shouldered giants,Atlases, criss-crossing Autoroute 1o south of Montreal. But ever ‘disaster’ develops from a new unpredicted (by most people) set of circumstances; it’s always a convergence of worst case scenario events. Am I right?
And in the past, it’s just taken an adventurous racoon, to bring down the grid. (Or so we were told.)Wasn’t that the cause of the New York Black Out of 64? It is in my mind.
Me, hmm. I guess I should stock up on water and those big bags of premium dog food when they are on sale.
My kitchen: Useless without electricity. Pretty useless for cooking in general, it’s so small.
