Thelma & Louise on Spring Break

One state west, in Missouri, the weather system we were traveling through had turned absolutely deadly as we blithely drove south, favorite CDs playing on the stereo system and a can of Diet Coke apiece.  More than a dozen people had died due to the storms we drove through that day in Missouri, Kentucky and southern Illinois.  But at the time, all we knew was that the windshield wipers wouldn’t lose their annoying “bumpety, bumpety, bumpety” sound every time they dragged across the glass for nine hours straight, the rental car’s steering had a definite “float” to it, especially in the wind, and the water in the drainage channels beside the two-lane road in southern Illinois seemed to be getting a wee bit high.

Oh, and the Dairy Queen sign next to a highway exit looked like it was going to be under water soon.   Raindrops broke the surface of the gleaming black pool surrounding it, lights from a nearby gas station shimmering off the rising water.  At the rate we were going, we were never going to make it to our motel in Montgomery, Alabama before three a.m.  We settled on a cheap room in Birmingham, found a double on our third try after midnight. 

Huh.  Welcome to spring break.

The first day of vacation had started off with not much more to recommend it.  Thick, cottony fog had cloaked most of the first leg of the trip from Wisconsin to Peoria, Illinois, where Kristin and I had arranged to meet to carpool for the rest of our impromptu adventure.  The fog had slowed me by about an hour, and the fact that I didn’t take five extra minutes to MapQuest the Peoria airport before leaving added another.  In my haste to get moving, I relied on the kind of blind optimism that propelled our forefathers into disasters like Custer’s Last Stand and the scenic trip through Donner Pass. 

Really, how hard could it be to find an airport in Peoria!!  For that matter, how big could Peoria really be??  Well, as it turned out, a lot bigger than I thought…and the kindness of strangers is no substitute for an actual plan.

No matter, Kristin and I were on a road trip for the history books, and we weren’t going to be deterred.  Sanity and good sense had nothing to do with it.  We were fed up with winter, pure and simple, and we were goin’ south. 

The winter had been long and ghastly in our neck of the woods, which roughly sketched would be a swath across Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois and Wisconsin.  Snowstorm after snowstorm.  School cancellation after school cancellation.  Temperatures below zero.  Days that I dutifully drove the fifty miles to work only to wish, halfway there and fishtailing on snow-covered roads that hadn’t been plowed, that I’d stayed safely home in bed. 

And the winds and the grey skies just kept coming.  It felt, deep down and for the first time that I could remember, like I would never see spring or green grass again.  Like I was living in the ice cap of the Arctic Circle, and flowers were something to be seen and admired only in catalogs, grown by happy gardeners in tropical warm, sunny places thousands of miles south.  Like I said, sanity had nothing to do with it…but by early March something in me had snapped and I became a desperate woman.  Apparently it was catchy, because we charged off our respective blocks only four days after Kristin—a friend from law school living a good six hours away in Iowa—sold her husband on the idea that she really needed a winter break too, and that he and their two daughters could spare her for a few days. 

The plan was simple—drive straight south until we hit the Gulf of Mexico, and stop at the first beach we saw.  And aside from the first day and a half of driving through steady rain, it actually worked.  About the time we got maybe sixty miles from Gulf Shores, Alabama, the skies finally parted, the sun came out, and we saw blue skies above.  And sure enough, when we finally ran out of highway, the road ended in a large paved public parking lot at the edge of a pure, white sand beach, with enormous breakers kicking up spray a few hundred feet out.  We locked the car, rolled up our pants, and happily waded in.

The trip was especially sweet when I thought back to my early years in college and realized I’d never properly been on “spring break” before.  Somehow multiple instances of herding four kids and a spouse and six pieces of luggage and a half suitcase full of Easter chocolate and bunny bags and plastic Easter grass  hidden under socks and a nightgown for a family vacation in a condo on the Georgia coast didn’t quite qualify.

The words “spring break” just had a connotation of more carefree abandon, of caution to the wind, of randomness and adventure and opportunity and the Great Unknown.  Of course, they also conjure up popular visions of “Girls Gone Wild” and drunken revelry and bikini-ready hardbodies oiled up and ready for Mai Tais and short-lived romance.  But hey, we had to start somewhere. 

There are advantages to doing some things when you’re over…thirty.  Sometimes it’s simply that you know, starting out, that your friendship is strong enough to survive a cramped, muscle-screaming drive of twelve hundred miles in two days in a compact car.  In our case, the catching up we did during the drive was half the adventure.  We’d weathered law school together, with all its exams and anxiety and pressure and competition and chocolate cravings.  Since then she and her family had moved twice, I’d gotten divorced and adjusted to all that that big change brings, and between the two of us, a full fifty percent of our children had weathered serious health crises resulting in major surgery.  Not to take anything away from the courage and grace and resilience of our kids in dealing with these horribly inequitable turns of chance…but that kind of misfortune gives two mothers a lot to talk about as the miles slide by.

Another advantage to being…over twenty-one…is that you don’t feel you’ve got to reinvent the wheel and discover everything for yourself to make the memories last.  I’d picked Gulf Shores as a destination because a clerk at the courthouse suggested off the cuff that it would be a nice place to visit, and two minutes on the internet later that night had me sold.  After arriving at the beach that first day, we struck up a conversation with a local and asked him where a good restaurant serving seafood might be found.  He pointed us up the street to a place with a full parking lot and a dolphin statue outside, and boy, was he right!

The next morning, with a full day of beach-going to make the most of, I wound up having breakfast with an elderly gentleman from Illinois who shanghaied me in the parking lot while Kristin—never a “morning person”—slept in, and directed me to the tourist welcome center I’d blindly driven past twice the night before.  Asked for the best, quietest beach around, the clerk at the welcome center pointed us to Cotton Bayou beach a few miles down the coast, her personal favorite.  Just to say we did, we drove past it by a few miles and into Florida looking for something better…and came right back.  Took her advice on a seafood restaurant near the beach for dinner too, wolfing down plate after plate of seafood appetizers, selfishly foregoing entirely the niceties of a full dinner (rolls, salad, potatos, veggies) in favor of crabmeat and shrimp from start to finish.  And after dinner, as we walked along the shore and watched the rising full moon shimmer over the shore, we never regretted not wasting our time looking for something better.

And the beach alone was worth it. Pure white “sugar sand” underfoot, the rise and fall of waves rushing in, the chorus of black-faced laughing gulls behind us, sounding like a bunch of raucous monkeys in a tree.  As I walked along the water’s edge, stopping to pick up the occasional small, perfect shell, I felt very much like the little girl I used to be, bent over and searching with single purpose for tiny shells along the edge of the Montrose Avenue beach in Chicago.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh had it exactly right in her book of heartfelt essays, “Gift from the Sea,” when she wrote that “the beach is not the place to work; to read, write or think.”  I have forgotten that many times over the years, bringing notebooks and pens to the shore as she once had, expecting to find the inspiration to write, only to find myself mesmerized by the sound of the waves and the wind, like listening to the world breathe.  Even this time, I had efficiently packed both a book and a magazine in my tote bag—“Angels and Demons” by Dan Brown and the latest Oprah magazine, you couldn’t ask for better, less demanding beach reading than that—and still found myself hypnotized by my surroundings.  The book and the magazine remained untouched as I stretched out full-length and dug my fingers into the warm, perfect sand beside me.

Instead of “accomplishing” anything, we shopped a little.  And stretched out on the shore a lot, waking long only enough to turn over and broil our other sides.  Lounging like lizards in the sun, we felt the energy of the universe permeate our frozen bone marrow and imprint our shivering psyches with memories of warmth that would have to last the rest of the winter.  With two blankets and plenty of sunblock, there was nothing that we lacked.  We lunched, and breakfasted, and otherwise snacked throughout the day on seafood dip on crackers brought in a picnic cooler that also held hummus, and cheese, and grapes, and fancy chocolates, and plenty of drinks.  Wine for her, Smirnoff Ice for me. 

While the signs posted at the edge of the beach all warned that alcoholic beverages were verboten, well, we were females over the age of thirty in bathing suits on a public beach, while college kids with better bodies in skimpier suits played Frisbee and volleyball nearby.  In other words, we were absolutely invisible.  A votre santé!  Having left our only bottle opener (my Swiss Army knife) back in the hotel room, Kristin laughingly drew on what she called her “sketchy past” and illustrated how to open a beer bottle with a house key.  Hey, it’s never too late to learn a new social skill.

Two days at the shore passed far too quickly by any measure.  We skipped a trip to a nearby outlet mall—surely a first for us—in favor of spending the last few hours on the beach.  Packed up and left straight from the shore, sand still in our shoes and the sound of the waves behind us.  The drive back was dry this time, but at two days, still far too long for anything like comfort.  We split again at the Peoria airport, with a shuffle of baggage and a quick hug before resuming our last sprints back toward reality.  In my case, reality involved serving Easter dinner for eight at my house the next day…after making a mad dash to the supermarket for something to cook. 

But I brought a piece of the shore back.  Not just in memory, but in a few handfuls of white sand and a half dozen shells in colors of grey and white and tangerine.  Encased now in a glass jar and wrapped with a ribbon the color of seafoam, a miniature version of the Gulf of Mexico sits on my desk at work, the swirls of the seashells drawing my hypnotically back to the rhythm of the shore, and reminding me daily of the value of acting on impulse once in a while.

Before I pick up another magazine or finish “Angels and Demons”…I feel like  re-reading “Gift from the Sea” once more.     

     

               

Fifty Shades of Cold

The weather forecasters were calling for the arrival of the first real blizzard of winter, and I was putting my first batch of Christmas cookies in the oven that morning. The holiday was less than a week away, and I figured that if I really focused, I could spend the next three days doing last-minute shopping, baking and wrapping, and still come up for air on Christmas Eve.

As usual, I had taken it right down to the wire, counting on and parsing out the last few days before Christmas, calculating that with three days “free” from the office before the first of the kids came home, I would have plenty of time for last-minute stuff like shopping for trinkets and chocolates to fill Christmas stockings, wrapping presents, making cookies, making the kitchen presentable.

And as usual, the best laid plans…

The snow started falling heavily by mid-day while the cookies baked and I finished decorating the balsam fir in the living room. My little Honda only clears the ground by four and a half inches, so I’m always cautious about driving over large snowballs, much less piles and drifts of the stuff. Early into the storm, I figured on staying put until the driveway was plowed. I blithely calculated that that I had plenty of food in the house and plenty of stuff to keep me busy in case I was snowed in…but an actual emergency still seemed like an exercise in abstract thinking.

But…living out in the country, one gets used to the idea that the power could go out when the weather gets bad, and by mid-afternoon I started the drill I had become familiar with after years of tornado warnings and high winds and ice storms. Really, the kids had grown up knowing that any time there was a hint of bad weather, I would insist on filling the bathtub “just in case.” And these always turned out to be false alarms.

Old habits die hard, though, and after the cookies had cooled and been put away, I began to methodically prep for hypothetical disaster. I ran the bathtub tap first, filling the tub more than half full. As the water gurgled out, I set to hauling in several bags of firewood, stacking them in the wrought iron rack beside the fireplace. I even detached one of the garage doors from its automatic electric opener “just in case.” I scrubbed and polished the glass fireplace doors until they squeaked, and then got the fire ready to start, with pine “fatwood” sticks balanced on strips of cardboard, then covered by small pieces of firewood that would catch a flame easily. What the heck, it would still be there to light on Christmas Eve when the kids came home!

I made sure that most of the candles were on the fireplace mantlepiece, away from where the cats could tip them over or set their tails on fire (don’t get me started on that story or how I could even think it a possibility…). I even dug out a tall glass and metal pillar candle arrangement I’d bought at a hostess party and never used, placing it in the middle of the kitchen table. There was no way the cats could get close to that flame, I reasoned. I put fresh batteries in flashlights, and made sure that my favorite “boat flashlight” was also on the kitchen table where I could find it in a hurry. I don’t own a boat, but for under five bucks at Walmart you can buy one of these huge plastic lamps that can light up half the yard, and the battery is included. And it’s so big it’s impossible to misplace.

Prepped for disaster, I relaxed and took another look outside. The floodlights cast circles of light into the darkness, and the snow blew in swirls and sheets from the rooftop down past the bay window. Without looking at the reflective fiberglass stakes stuck in the grass to guide the guy who plows my driveway, it was impossible to tell where concrete ended and lawn began. Judging by the white swells and drifts, there was no way I was driving anywhere until the plow came through.

The cookies packed away and the tree finished, it was finally time to relax! I turned off the lights in the kitchen, and turned on the lights of the Christmas tree. They glittered off the pretty iridescent plastic icicles that had been a holiday fixture for years, and softly illuminated the ceramic birds and other woodland creatures jockeying for space with familiar blown glass fruits and the assortment of antique glass ornaments I’d recently scored at a garage sale. I settled into my “couch groove” on the left side of the recliner sofa, as deep as anything Homer Simpson could brag about. Then I pulled a fluffy blanket across my lap, and reached for the TV remote on a nearby table. As I began to channel surf, both cats jumped into my lap and settled in contentedly for a nap. And then, with no sound or flicker or warning, the power went out and the house and the world went utterly dark.

“Crap!” was my first thought. Though, I then thought smugly, I was ready for it, wasn’t I? I tipped the cats out of my lap, and found my way around to the candles and books of matches on the mantle nearby. I lit the candles one by one, and the room once more came into view. I even lit the pillar candle in the kitchen, and it proved to be a charming sight. It was nothing you could read by, but the silhouettes of moose and pine trees that surrounded the tall candle gave off a rustic, woodsy air. Then I lit the fire, tossed in a few more logs, and settled back on the sofa until rescue could come in one form or another.

That was at six o’clock. The fire needed feeding about every hour. By eight, it was rip-roaring blazing, and I was starting to get bored. I hadn’t planned far enough ahead to charge up my Kindle and the little book-light that went with it, and I didn’t want to waste flashlight batteries on reading a book with actual pages. The cats were pleased as could be and purring loudly, with a warm fire and a warm lap. The dog, Lucky, stretched out under the recliner footrest where he could keep a watchful eye on us all. I, on the other hand, felt more and more irritated and restless and cranky by the minute.

How the heck did the early settlers do it, I thought? Needlework by candlelight? Early bedtimes? Math lessons scratched out on the back of shovel with a lump of charcoal by an oil lamp? I’ve always said that I would have made a lousy pioneer and would have been kicked out of the wagon train for whining at the first river crossing…but this totally sealed my conviction.

On the plus side, I discovered that my cell phone still worked. I checked in with the man in my life who happened to be caught in the same storm twenty-five miles away. He gallantly volunteered to drive his small car through the blizzard to keep me company and bring me supplies. I protested, and insisted that he stay put—not only were the highway conditions absolutely treacherous, even if he got to my house in once piece, there would be no way his car could cut through the drifts in my long driveway. I was absolutely sure that I’d be fine.

We hunkered down to wait things out in our respective digs. The decorative ceramic clock on an antique shelf in the living room chimed nine o’clock. I threw some more wood in the fire, and decided to call it a night. I couldn’t read, I couldn’t watch TV, I didn’t have a battery-operated radio to listen to…and with the snow and wind still pounding against the house, odds were that the power wouldn’t be restored very soon.

I set the alarm on my cell phone for an hour and fifteen minutes, stretched the recliner as far back as it would go, and pulled a couple of lap blankets up to my chin. Two cats immediately jostled for space on my mid-section, and I was glad for the warmth. I drifted off to sleep.

When the alarm went off, I saw immediately that the fire had burned down nearly to embers. I stoked it up again, and then repeated the alarm-recliner-blankets-cats cycle. The next time I woke up, I saw again that the fire had burned down to the point that it took a good effort to stoke it back up. This time I tweaked the system, and set the alarm to go off just an hour later. Recliner, blankets, cats, snooze…

By three in the morning, my good humor was starting to wear thin. And despite my best fire-tending efforts, the temperature in the living room was starting to drop a degree or two. After I stoked up the fire yet again, I made my way to the bedroom to find some warmer clothes. I dressed by flashlight in my warmest sweatpants and pulled a fleece high-necked sweater over a couple of shirts. Then, turning to find my shoes, I accidentally knocked the boat flashlight from the bed. I heard glass break as it hit the floor, and the flashlight was dead. I made my way back to the living room by the flickering firelight, and shoved a mini-flashlight into my pocket.

At five in the morning, I finally shoved the last stick of wood into the fireplace and closed the glass doors. There was little use in counting on the power being restored in the next hour, and I suited up for a cold trek to the garage. Hat, parka, mukluks, gloves, carry-bag, flashlight. It felt strange to step out into the night without the familiar floodlights on the house and garage. Where it drifted up against the garage, the snow was up to my knees. And the snow just kept falling.

I pulled up the smaller door (finally, foresight proved right!), and began to search the racks for the driest pieces of wood I could find. I hauled two bags inside through the darkness. Across the street, I couldn’t quite make out whether there were lights at my neighbors’ house…or if my tired eyes were playing tricks on me. On my final trek for more wood, I heard the sound of a powerful truck motor, and turned to see the outlines of a snowplow illuminated by headlights. The driver—another neighbor—exchanged a few “lovely weather we’re having” sentiments through the window of the truck cab, and then I trudged back to the house. Indeed, I found in our brief exchange, the power was out for the entire street. And nobody still had any idea of when it would come back on.

Dawn finally came, and the snow finally quit, and the living room started to warm a little in the sunlight. I let the fire die down so that I didn’t leave the house with a fire blazing in the grate, and then—no longer marooned by drifts—made a short run to a nearby Walmart. For one thing, I could recharge my dwindling cell phone battery in the car as I drove. And for another, I wanted to stock up on flashlight batteries…and get another boat lantern. I bought two when I got there, in fact, one of them a “new and improved” LED version that promised to deliver about 44 hours of light using the same sized battery that the conventional model would run on for only four and a half. There are times that I just love technology.

The entire day proceeded on a feed-the-fire-every-hour rhythm, though now I could at least see what I was doing…and could occasionally just sit and read a book in daylight. I ran into my neighbor by the mailbox, and she offered to let me use her house if I needed to, since she and her husband had a generator that they were running. Well, that would explain the lights during the storm the night before!

As the day wore on with still no power, the man in my life made continued pitches for me to bring the animals and myself down to his place for the evening, and avail myself of a hot meal and a warm shower and comfortable bed. It was so utterly deliciously tempting… I finally said that I would…but I still wanted to wait it out until late in the evening, just to keep the place warm and the pipes from freezing. As darkness fell, I took up my familiar spot in the couch groove, but this time I was ready for reading. There was enough battery life left in my Kindle for me to read an entire suspense novel, guilt-free, by the energy-efficient light of my new LED boat lantern. They do say that necessity is the mother of invention.

By nine at night, the house was still dark except for candlelight and the fireplace, and I started to make preparations to leave. And then I stopped short, and called him and refused. If I left the house and the power stayed off, the temps in the house would surely drop, a LOT. I didn’t think I could face walking back into a living room in the mid-forties and shoveling firewood like a train engineer fueling a coal engine until the house warmed up again. Easier to stay put, waking every hour and feeding the fire like a sleep-deprived zombie.

“I’ll be there in forty-five minutes,” he said. And then he was, bearing a warm pizza fresh from his oven, a bottle of wine, and a promise to help tend the fire throughout the night so that I could finally get some sleep. We set up the sleeping bags he’d brought in front of the fireplace, and talked, and finally dozed off, our heads close to the fireplace doors and the wood rack within his arms’ reach.

When I woke up, my face felt cold and it was four hours later. Good intentions had gone awry, and we had both slept through the fire-tending duties. The fire was out, with barely an ember left. I tried to nudge him awake. No luck. I nudged harder. Still no luck again, he was comfortably slumbering and totally out cold. I checked my cell phone. It was three in the morning. I looked at the battery-operated thermometer on the living room wall. It was only eleven degrees outside…and the living room temperature had fallen to a a chilly fifty-eight degrees inside.

I sighed…and then went to work building up the fire again with crumpled newspaper and fatwood sticks and paper towels soaked with alcohol. A half hour later it was roaring, but the wood supply was getting mighty low. And so for the second night in a row, I went trudging through the darkness with a flashlight and a carry-bag, toting in more firewood to keep the critters from freezing and the pipes from bursting. Ah, I thought, there’s just nothin’ like country livin’.

By morning, I had made my third or fourth call to the power company to check on the progress of things. This time, they finally had an estimate, and I was assured that while thousands of people had had their power restored, my forlorn street was one of the last technical holdouts in the area. “By ten o’clock,” the lady on the other end of the line estimated. Though she didn’t know if that actually meant ten in the morning or ten at night.

The man in my life eventually departed for his own house (after hauling in some more wood before he left), and I gritted my teeth in anticipation of yet another day of peanut butter sandwiches and bowls of granola with yogurt and round-the-clock fire tending. We hugged, and made plans for dinner at his house, come hell or high water.

Then, with a wave, he drove off down the driveway, and I shut the door to keep in the precious warmth. He called a minute later to tell me that he’d encountered some linemen working on a transformer up at the end of the road, and that prospects looked good for getting the power back up. Two minutes later, the lights on the Christmas tree suddenly came on, and I could hear the furnace start to hum.

Ah, rescue at last! It had been forty hours since the world suddenly went dark, and my longstanding fill-the-bathtub precautions finally turned out to have some practical value.

I’ve reshelved the pretty pillar candle and stashed the boat lanterns away, and made peace with the fact that I had to throw out just about everything in the fridge. Six months later, roses are starting to bloom where drifts had covered windows, and if the temperatures dip too low, the only thing we worry about these days is frost on tender plants.

You can never predict when something like that is going to happen, you can just hope it won’t, and plan to have enough batteries and candles and firewood to get you through it if does. There is one thing I expect, though, and it doesn’t take a Magic 8 ball or gypsy palm reader to predict it for me. And that is…

I’m pretty sure that I see a portable generator in my future. Forty hours of candlelight is so…1800s!