04-07-2008 05:58:04

Remembering ice storms of the past

by Caroline Barnes of Knox

Remember the Ice Storm? Hardly. It was 1929, and I was just born, or about to be born. My grandmother had come to Lewiston from her home in Westfield, Mass., to help during my mother’s “confinement,” and to help with the new baby. Me. But her father, my greatgrandfather, died unexpectedly in auburn, Mass. So my grandmother had to travel from Lewiston to Portland on the trolley car to get a train to Worcester. I heard tell often of her trolley trip – the frozen switches on the rail line; the trolley pulley falling off the overhead wires because of the ice... Why was there any electricity? I don’t know. But I do know that she got to Portland – finally – and safely to the bosom of her family in Auburn.

Remember the Ice Storm? Yes, but I don’t remember the year in the 1940s. We were living in the old farmhouse in Lewiston – now a modern home, with “conveniences” of old – wood stove, fireplace, candles, kerosene lanterns – and, since the gas and water lines are underground in the city, we had a cook stove and water. But all the young birches at our farm on the Lisbon border were permanently bent (see Robert Frost’s poem “Birches”K). For years, I helped my father cut and trim out those trees; pile them into the utility trailer; and haul them to the cellar of our barn in Lewiston. I don’t know how many years it was before all that wood was burned.

Remember the ice storm? 1998? Yes, and now I was living in Knox, in a modern home with no barn. But I am a Girl Scout––I felt prepared. We have a wood stove in the cellar that can heat the pipes for our hot-water baseboard heat if the furnace doesn’t work. We had propane lanterns and a propane cook stove left over from our camping years. We had candles, and a cold cellar full of vegetables, canned and “root cellared” from the garden. If we didn’t open the freezers, would they hold until the power came on? Yes! Even after a week, we only lost a little of the ice cream.

It’s an ill wind that blows no good. The maple trees in front of our house had been “trimmed out” shortly after we moved here in 1980. I had saved another $700 to have trimmed again in 1999. The National Guard saved me that money, although the trees are still pretty much “picked chickens.” And I really hadn’t planned to have the young maple behind the house spilt and land on the roof. Fortunately, the ice-stiffened branches held the weight of the tree off the roof–and the house insurance paid for its removal. The heartbreaking part was seeing the branches that weren’t salvaged by me or the woodcutters hauled off–and burned in a local gravel pit.

Yes, I keep several gallons of water always on hand in the cellar–and the “roof drips”-filled buckets to flush the toilet. Our good neighbors at the farm equipment store worked right through the storm, thanks to the big generators run by power take-offs on their tractors. They helped by giving us drinking water when I ran low.

[This article is incomplete. To read the whole article, please pick up a Townline at your local store, or at the Townline Office in South China, behind Border Trust Bank. Thank you for reading.]