The Note

T h e   N o t e

Here is a winter story to cool you off. Stop me if I’ve told you this already.

This mostly true story is dedicated to one of my sons-in-law, John Houser. More about that below.

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I live in Alabama. In mid-March 1993 it started snowing on a Friday night and we ended up with about 17 inches of snow on the ground. Temperatures barely got over no degrees Fahrenheit for a few days. This was part of a massive and freakish storm system that clobbered a huge portion of the eastern half of the USA.

If you don’t live in the South, it will be hard for you to understand the implications of that kind of weather event in a place like this.

(This is where the shout-out to my son-in-law comes in. He grew up in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, and has now had to cope with a few years of his Alabama-born wife and his in-laws telling stories about the Great Blizzard of 1993. “It’s not like you guys were in the Donner Party or anything,” he has been known to scoff.)

Communities in the south just don’t maintain the kind of equipment and personnel to clear roads in a major snowfall. (Not to mention that no one here knows how to drive on snowy roads.) Even 6 or 8 inches of snow can more or less paralyze places like Alabama. This 1993 snowfall brought down an uncountable number of trees and power lines. Pretty much destroyed the power grid. Many of us endured a week or so with no heat or electricity.

Everyone who was in this area for the storm has blizzard stories to annoy their sons-in-law from Indiana. This is one of ours.

Our power was out, I believe, for 8 days. We went through all our firewood quickly. Hotel rooms were not to be found. So we bundled up, partly warmed ourselves with hot water bottles. Heated soup on the fireplace gas starter. I would say it was an adventure, which it was, for about 3 days. Then it was miserable.

The interior of our house got colder with each new night with no heat. My wife and I were developing a kind of dull, body- and brain-numbing fatigue. On the last night before we got power back, in the wee hours, I was awakened by a series of animal screams right outside our bedroom window. The best way I can describe it is a cross between the cries of an agitated chimp and the wail of a deranged juvenile orangutan. Exotic. Otherworldly. Terrifying. 

Now, I preface what I am about to write by telling you that I was half-delirious, as many of us are when awakened suddenly. The week of cold and dark could not have helped. For whatever reason, the thought that immediately crossed my mind was that, due to the blizzard, bloodthirsty baboons had somehow escaped from the Birmingham Zoo and were roaming our neighborhood at will.

Later, someone told me that the most likely source of the sound was a pair of mating raccoons. Admittedly, in a snowy suburb, this is more plausible than murdering baboons.

(Actually, this photo is only slightly less terrifying than the baboon photo.)

Here's issue 66, just one more 6 away from being right out of the Book of Revelation.  

some stuff right out of the Book of Revelation

My thanks to all who contributed and all who submitted. Thanks to our team of volunteer readers. Special thanks, as always, to my colleagues, the F troop: F. John Sharp and F. J. Bergmann.  

Enjoy.

                    Dale