The Jewels of Nebraska, Episode 3; A Gloved Hand

To start this series from the beginning.

Kohn stood on the back platform of the train. He saw many things most would not: where deer, dogs and other fauna had crossed the tracks, where hobos had hopped, as well as, jumped from the train and their numbers. He could see up-turned leaves, bent branches and gravel disturbed from a foot fall like you or I might read a book. It's my notion that there was more to it than his regular senses. His eyes took in the whole of the receding scenery without a turn of his head. When he saw what he was looking for, he went back inside the rail car and grasped the emergency brake. He paused and smiled.

He waited. His thimbles tapped gently on the brake handle. He waited even though it meant a further walk to the spot along the tracks where a couple of kids had rolled into the brush, likely kin the way they were holding on to one another. It was a good five minutes before his moment arrived.

The large woman who had earlier eyed he and his thimbles with disgust, rose from her seat to make her way to the privy. She had also spoken ill of him to her young traveling companion in a voice loud enough to be heard, but quiet enough to pretend it wasn't.

Kohn yanked on the cord. The train wailed and screeched like a wounded animal. The sudden stop sent the woman flying in a rustling bloom of petty coats. She gave a soprano wail mid-air and landed in the aisle like a beef side on a butcher's block.

Kohn thought he could hear her corset pop several seams upon impact.

He pulled his sachel off the rack, stepped out the door and off the back of the train. He walked East, ignoring the conductor's calls to him.

“Sir, SIR! Return to this train at once!”

My kids huddled in the pines just short of a meadow looking at the quiet looking farm before sun up. They had never seen so many trees in all their lives, but they were too hungry to care about the scenery. Billy had his eyes on the chicken coop. “Look Ruby, eggs!”

“You set foot in with them chickens they're gunna raise cain and next thing you know you'll have a blast of rock salt in your seat. 'Sides, how we gunna cook em anyhow?”

They carefully plied the tall grass towards a patch of garden. They stepped over a wire fence that aimed to keep the critters out. Ruby grabbed small heads of cabbage and green tomatoes off a vine supported by a trio of sticks. William found him a strawberry patch.

“Ruby, look!” he whispered.

“Shhh!”

He held out his shirt and dropped the berries in, though most were pinkish and hard. Some were dark and soft. They smooshed in in fingers.

“Hey!” a man yelled from near the farm house.

The kids' heads popped up like startled deer.

“Run Billy.” shouted Ruby.

Billy tried to jump the fence but his boot caught the wire and he went down, squashing his loot of berries. He stopped to collect them. Heavy footfalls him scared him into off the tall grass before he'd recovered a one.

Ruby ran in a parallel path of her brother's for the pines. Her dress and its stolen contents she held up in her one good arm. Her bare knees scraped against the weeds and grass, they felt raw and cold. A hidden rock met her boot and she sailed forward and crashed onto her arm. She cried out. Pain shot from her shoulder in its tender state. Her toe was throbbing to boot.

“Ruby!” Billy cried out.

“Run!” cried her voice from somewhere in the grass. “Run stupid!”

Ruby heard footsteps in the grass making their way towards her. She felt around for a rock, a stick, anything to defend herself with. A figure with immense shoulders filled the sky above her. A hand reached down and grabbed her by the arm. She shrieked in pain. The hand let go.

“You're hurt,” said a surprisingly gentle voice.

Ruby limped back to the small house with the man. She glanced back at the pines.

“Come on back boy, no one's gunna hurt you. This girl's hurt, we're going to get her fixed up.”

William stayed hidden.

“I've got eggs, little bit of bacon if you're hungry.” Shouted the man back towards the pines as he helped Ruby along.

A head popped up out of the grass.

In the house the broad shouldered man helped Ruby into a chair.

“What'd you do to that shoulder miss?” He said noting the underwear sling she was wearing.

“I... fell.”

“Right off a train from the look of ya.”

She looked up at him. “Maybe. Not that it's any of your business.”

“Like stealin' from my garden? No matter. Let's get some chow going, then we'll have a look at that shoulder.”

“William, slow down!” Ruby said to her brother. He was on his second plate of bacon and eggs. His shirt front was stained red from the cache of strawberries he had landed upon.

“Ah, he's hungry,” said Ben. “Now we gotta fix you up girl,” he said wiping his hands and hanging the rag in front of the stove.

“You a doctor?”

“Better, I was a medic in the war. Pull your dress down over your shoulder so I can take a look.”

“I'll do no such thing!” Ruby clutched her collar. Ben just stood before her. Ruby grumbled and looked downward. She fumbled with the buttons with her good hand.

“I'll do it,” Ben said. Ruby shrunk back but he reached out pulled her back straight. “It's just doctorin', girl it don't mean for nuthin'. Yer just a skinny thing anyway."

"I ain't that skinny."

Ruby lowered her good arm, but she couldn't keep from blushing. Ben un-did a few buttons and pulled her collar to the side, baring her shoulder. He looked at her just as if she was a lame calf or a broken plow. His large hand nearly covered her entire shoulder as he palpated the injury. It was warm and rough.

“Just as I thought. No cuts though, that's good.”

“What? What is it?” Ruby said pulling her collar back shyly and held the ends together.

“Hold still.”

Ben walked around behind. Two large arms wrapped around her.

“What are you doing? Unhand me!”

The arms squeezed her tight and his hand gripped her wounded wing pulling it back and outwards.

“Ow! OW! Stop it, you're hurting me.”

He only pulled harder.

“OWWW!”

Her arm felt like it would be pulled right off her body. She screamed. William jumped on Ben and began beating his back. Ruby felt her shoulder pop with a sharp pain. Ben released her and paid no heed to the boy hanging on him, fists still pounding.

Ruby jumped out of her chair and backed away. She instinctively rubbed her shoulder. Her expression softened.

“Hey... the pain, it's all gone!” Ruby rotating her arm experimentally. “It feels... a little sore, but fine! Billy... BILLY! Get off him.”

Billy's boots clomped to the floor when he let go.

“How'd you do that?” she said.

“Your arm bone was out of the socket. I just reduced it, popped it back. It'll be a little sore for a few days, but...”

“That's amazing!” Ruby said moving her arm every which way. She was feeling lightheaded in the sudden absence of the pain, almost euphoric.

“You some sort of wizard?” William asked, rubbing his fists.

“Nope. Saw a few things like that in the army. Wish that was the worst I saw.”

“Our Pa died in the war.”

“Billy, hush.” Ruby chided.

“But he did!”

“It ain't polite.”

Ben was quiet for a long spell. He fixed Ruby some breakfast.

I can't imagine what that man saw. Sure enough, I was there in France myself, right in the trenches. But my number came up before my boots were broke in. You want to think of life like a hand of cards: you loose, you get another hand, and another; always another hand. But I hadn't fired a single bullet and it was all over for me, no second chance at bat, no more innings, no more games. The loudest sound I'd ever heard in my life was followed by the greatest silence I ever could have imagined. Like I told ya though, I wasn't angry, that all goes away with the noise.

I'm watchin' over my kids, as you know. I can't explain to ya how, but I'm sittin' in the state hospital with my Lottie every moment at the same time. Even now she looks prettier to me than she ever did. Living eyes would barely see the girl I first met.

Yes she was a head turner, a real lady of a well-to-do family from Philadelphia. I was the son of a man who hauled bags of flour on his back. I was dirty and covered with sweat from doing the same when I went meet my brother at Burlington station in Omaha. She was an angel dressed in finery being helped from a private car with a gloved hand.

No one ever would have guessed on that day I would be the lucky man to put a ring on her finger. No one except me.

Continued in episode 4

the Jewels of Nebraska, Episode 2: Thimbles and Long Johns

To start this series from the beginning.

Kohn Bördson should have been in an asylum, and he might have been if there was anyone crazy enough to put and keep him there. I'd heard of him when I was alive. Shoot, everyone in Western Nebraska had. He was a big tall Swede with graying red hair and eyes so piercing light blue that he seemed to create a shadow behind anything he stared at. No one I had talked who had cast that shadow seemed very happy about it.

Kohn had lived with a tribe of Lakota Sioux for some years as a youngun. He could track anything that drew breath, so said, and above all, he had a strange preoccupation with thimbles; wore silver thimbles on his fingers at all times. Some people thought he had lost the tips of his fingers in an Indian rite or some accident, but this was not true. He wore them because hated the feel of touching anything. He had also grown partial to the sound they made tapping on a table or scraping along the grand stair railing of a fine hotel.

“Kids?” he said pulling on his mustache, “waste my time.”

“You are in my debt Mr. Bördson.” Bodene said. He tried altering his posture in the chair to see the man's face beneath the brim of his hat.

“I pay you another time. No kids.”

“Did someone get you to church?”

“No, kids too easy. It's insult.”

“Your past debt, plus five thousand.”

Kohn drank his whiskey in one gulp and turned the glass over looking at his thimbles through its semi-clean surface.
"Booze illegal to everyone but you? Its broad daylight for Pete's sake."

“Each,” said Kohn.
"Pardon?"
"Five thousand," he put his glass down, "each."

Before he could complain, Kohn raised his head and his black Stetson making the full gaze of his expression visible to Bodene. His thimbled fingers made a galloping motion, threatening to strike the barroom table, only coming close.

“Okay, okay, five thousand each,” Bodene relented.

Kohn's unchanged face told him that the deal, and the conversation, were done.

“I'm hungry.” Billy said.

Ruby woke up to her little brothers voice. She was cold, like it was fall. She couldn't make out much through the open box car door. She pulled her mama's shawl tight around her shoulders and went to the door. When she looked up she could see stars but right in front of her it was as black and nothin'. The line between the two was a jagged line of rock that wavered up and down with the motion of the train. They were next to some sort of rock face only a few feet from the tracks. The rock face fell away and she could see further. Ruby took a breath. The air was perfumed with pine and the sweetness of a blossom she did not know. For the first time in her life, the horizon did not make a straight line. Its silhouette climbed and fell in peaks and valleys.

They were in the mountains.

She thought of a dancer she had seen on a trip to Omaha. Ruby had seen pictures of mountains in a National Geographic at Doc Fox's house, and now she was there. She wished for daylight.

“I'm hungry Ruby,” he repeated.

She reached into her bag and broke off a hard piece of biscuit. Billy held it close to his face in the dark, made a face and threw it out of the open box car.

“What are you doin'! That's our food you little...”

“I want eggs!”

She wanted to hit him. Then she saw the faint glisten of a tear on his cheek. She drew him to her.

“I know, so do I.”

Kohn stood on the tracks. He looked East, then West. He bent down and held a handful of gravel in his hand. He got up and strolled to the station. His thimbles drummed on the ticket window until a frail old man emerged.

“Yes?”

“Grand Junction,” Kohn said, "one way."

The train started to slow in lurches and screeches.

“C'mon,” said Ruby.

“We're getting' off?” said Billy.

“There ain't no food here. Sit on the edge.”

“But we're still moving.”

“We don't it's not just going to speed up again. Hold my hand.”

My kids waited for what looked like a soft patch of land and jumped. No patch of land is soft at fifteen miles an hour though and Ruby felt a sharp pain as she hit.

As their Papa, you'd think I'd be worried and fixin' on how I could help 'em, make 'em safe. I can only observe, there's nothing I can do to help my children anymore. I'm not sure how to put it in words for ya, but there is no fear for me anymore and with it went away anything that could vex me. Might have made me crazy when I was walking the earth mortal like, but in the split second before I died, all I could think was that I'd never see my children again, that I broken my promise to Lottie. Yet there they were; my precious children along side the tracks near Eldorado Springs Colorado. Being with them, however it that be, was a blessing I'll never be able to find the right praise for.

 When Ruby jammed her shoulder jumpin' from that train. I didn't feel the angst of a father like I would have. I saw that she did it protecting her little brother.

Billy remembered breaking his shoulder falling from the hay loft when he was a spot younger. Doc Fox put his arm in a bed sheet so it hung from his neck. He fashioned one for his sister out of his long johns.

“I ain't wearing that thing.”

“Ruby, you got to, you can't barely move it.”

“I can't go 'round in your underwear.”

“It's the only thing long enough to tie around your neck, less'n you wanna tear up one of your dresses.”

He had her there. “But what if someone sees.?”

Billy looked around at the wilderness and back at his sister. She humph'd started walking down the tracks.

“Why you going that way?” he said, running to catch up. “That's the way we came?”

“There was a town, some houses. Maybe we can find a garden before someone wakes up. Food or not, I'm just hopin' for a bed sheet on a clothesline so I can get your smelly skivvies off me.”

Continued in episode 3

The Jewels of Nebraska, Episode 1 -The Telegram

This is a new series I will be updating with a new episode every Saturday at 3PM Eastern/Noon Pacific. These episodes will be shorter than my blog has been in the past and easier for both you and I to manage. My goal is for each episode to be a five minute read.

Yay! 

I can't say how long this series will last, like on television, it will depend on interest. That said, I anticipate several months of episodes.

Enjoy...

The Jewels of Nebraska

Episode 1, The Telegram

It was just like the telegram, early in the afternoon, but the thunderstorm storm made it nearly as dark as night. The sound of the Model T plying it's way through the mud track could barely be heard above the din of the wind and rain.

It wasn't only those similarities that had Ruby's mind stewin' with worry. She and Billy had been alone in the Nebraska farm house since the day before. Their Mama was in one of her states and took the truck to town. No one in their right mind would come out in this storm unless it was news, bad news.

The Sheriff stood on the porch holding his dripping hat in both hands when Ruby opened the door.

“It's your mom. She's alright. She's... safe.” The sheriff said, “Ruby, I had to lock her up, she was really scarin' folks this time. They're coming to take her to the state hospital tomorrow. I had to do it Ruby, you understand.”

“Yup, fraid I do.”

“Why don't you and Billy come back to town with me, you can stay at my sisters till social services can...”

“That's okay Sheriff, uh, Henry is going to check on us later, we'll go back with him. We're closer to home that way.”

He looked back at the storm to hide his relief. “Maybe that's best.”

You can't blame her fer lyin' no sir. They'd had a taste of being wards of the state before fer a spell. Them kids had been on their own in any practical sense since that telegram. Their mama, god love her, had never been the same after that day: July 19^th, 1917; I had been dead in France for nearly two weeks before my family knew a thing about it.

“Is Henry really comin' by?” said Billy after his sister closed the front door and stuffed the edges back up with rags.

“No.”

“What'll we do when those people from the county come by?”

“We won't be here.”

I s'pose if I'd know'd their Mama was going to have the time she did loosing me and being left to raise a nine-year old girl and a five-year-old boy, I'd have rotted in shame in some jail cell before goin' off to fight the Kaiser. Least she'd know'd I was okay and those kids would have a papa again some day.

My dear Lottie did the best she could for five years, but I guess she just run outta steam. Lord knows the medicine she got from that travelin' show didn't do her no good. She took too a strong liking to it and when it run out, she used whatever she could find.

The next morning, before dawn, Ruby and William crept through the Alliance switch yards. Ruby found a Westbound boxcar. She helped her brother in and darn near missed it herself with the train pulling away. Good strong legs that girl, even though she's still kinda small and skinny.

She had a feelin' her mama wasn't coming back this time round. I suppose there was somethin else that made her jump that train. That girl and her brother snuck into the pictures every chance they got.

“Where we goin' Ruby.”

“Hush! They beats them that rides the rails, if they catch 'em.”

“But what about my dog, and my climbing tree?”

“You'r dog'll be fine, the Hendersons will take it, and everything else I s'pose, before the bank comes. You don't need a climbing tree where we're goin anyway.”

“But where's that?”

I had never been much further West than Alliance, Nebraska myself. I was born in 1888, about the same time the railroad came through, but I was born back East in Omaha, same as our Ruby in 1908. Alliance was still considered the frontier when we bought our farm, when Ruby was just a baby. Billy came about four years and three still borns later. Maybe I shoulda known Lottie wasn't right before I got drafted in '17. Farming is a hard life. Loosing a baby is harder, but there were crops to tend and there wasn't much time to grieve. My wife worked as hard as anyone and didn't let on how much she hurt I don't reckon. When William was born strong and healthy, she was so happy and I thought she'd be right as rain again.

Then my number came up and I was on a train to Georgia. She was scared but I promised her I'd be back.

I had only been in France a few days when it all ended, but I kept my promise. I kept it the only way I could.

I could feel Ruby was scared but at peace somehow for the first time since the telegram. She was sleepy too, but being the big sister she was, she watched over William, his head on her lap. The boxcar was windy and noisy. It smelled of sawdust and coal smoke. The sun got higher behind them, it was already warm. The sky was the bluest it had been all summer, not a cloud in sight. Fields and farm houses passed by endlessly. She wondered about the girls her age on those farms. They had papas that came home from the war, and mamas that didn't cry for hours every day. She wondered about the people they would meet in their travels. She hoped they'd be the kind Christian sort.

The train crossed a switch and jostled Billy awake.

“Where's Hollywood Ruby?” He said inside of a yawn.

“California, a long way off yet. I don't spect we're in Colorado yet,”she said.

“We're gunna be in pictures?”

“That's right.”

“And you're gunna be Lillian Gish?”

“That's right.”

“Who can I be, Charlie Chaplin?”

“No, Jackie Coogan.”
"Jackie Coogan?"
"Yeah, you know, the Kid."
"Oh. I remember."
"Get some sleep Billy. Dream of California."

Bodene Kruger stepped out his automobile stood toe to toe with the sheriff. The Sheriff took a step back. “You did what!” Bodene said.

“How was I to know she was lying about being checked on?” said the Sheriff, “you saw the weather last night.”

“I saw it alright.” He kicked at the mud clots on his Daimler. “That family owes my bank over ten thousand on that farm and they're holding out on me, she was from money back East, part of of why I let em sign. Those Newberry kids have jumped on their debts, and with a bundle of cash or stocks or something, I just know it.”

“I don't know bout that Mr. Kruger. Did you see how those folks lived? Wasn't always food on the table. Sides, what do you expect me to do. I can't just go chasin' after a couple runaway kids. If they're in Box Butte County, I'll find em, but otherwise...”

“Put out a wire, a wanted poster.”

“ 'Wanted, dead or a live, fourteen-year-old girl and her ten-year old brother'? They haven't broken any laws, you have no proof that they stole anything. I'll notify Morrel, Scott's Bluff and Sheridan maybe, but that's really all I can do.”

“If you're not going to do your job Terrence, I'm just going to have to find a man who will, and I think I know just who.”

The Sheriff looked up for the first time. “I sure hope you're not talking about who I think you're talking about.”

Continued in episode 2

And all the Trees Were Weeping Willows -The Ice Storm of 1991

Winter seemed to be winding down in Rochester, New York. There had already been several jacket-free days. For you Southern Californians; this means forty-five degrees or above. Crocus was already blooming, it was enough to lull you into the belief that winter had done it's worse. Even if you knew better, which, of course, everyone did.

I hadn't seen my roommate in a while. He had gone off on a week-long trip that was going on three. I didn't even know where. Things were either going splendidly for him, or horribly, horribly wrong.

I was happy enough to have the house to myself.

When he did show up, the first, and practically last, words out of his mouth were: “I'm moving to New Orleans!” I appeared to be happy for him, but I was mostly just happy for me.

He packed every inch of his Hyundai, leaving a small spot to see out the windshield and left behind everything that wouldn't fit, including the table I am sitting at here in California twenty-one years later.

He also left an unpaid electric bill of over six hundred dollars and a notice from the power company that they were going to disconnect the power on Monday, March 4^th.

It was Thursday.

That night I was leaving myself on a weekend road trip to Tennessee with my brother. From a payphone in Nashville the next day, I explained to Rochester Gas and Electric that I was a new tenant and so there would be no need to shut off my power thank-you-very-much. They explained to me that with a copy of my new lease they would be happy set up a new account and not leave me in the dark. I couldn't get a hold of my landlord before the close of business that day so that, as they say, was that. I would just have to deal with it on Monday if possible, or live a few days without power.

My brother I and took turns driving on the fourteen hour trip home. We left Sunday night with hopes of arriving in Rochester before rush hour. The only sleep to be had that night was by the one with the steering wheel in his hands. Knowing this, the one in the passenger seat sat wide awake with half an eye on the groggy driver. The driving shifts got shorter and shorter as the night progressed.

As the Interstate passed close to Lake Erie the wind blew rain and the road became crusty with ice. Driving wasn't any easier, but the bucking and slipping of the car made it easier for the driver to stay awake, and impossible for the passenger to even close their eyes.

In the the sky above us, a rare set of conditions were forming: layers of warm and cold air had formed at relatively low altitudes and the surface temperature was steady just below the freezing point. Upper atmosphere snow was being melted by the warm layers of air, the resulting droplets supercooled by the cold layers then turning to ice the moment it hit the ground, pavement, or building...

...or tree branch.

On the radio: advisories and warnings, but our radio, wasn't on.

The Sun was coming up. Between our fatigue and the weather, our plans to beat rush hour were dashed. We were doomed to spend the last hour of our dreary journey being repeatedly jolted awake by brake lights and being elbowed by the wide-eyed one in the passenger seat.

The daylight showed a different landscape than we had expected. Trees seemed to glisten in the morning light. There was no snow, yet everything was a shiny white. I looked closely at a chain-link fence along the 490 Expressway. It was a solid glass sheet of ice from top to bottom. The holes between the links had completely closed!

Something was wrong with the trees too. They were all weeping willows, hanging low in graceful sad arches. These were not willows though, trees of all sorts were bending to their breaking point and beyond, laden with an inch-thick coating of ice on every twig. Thousands and thousands of pounds of ice.

Something else was wrong; more wrong and out-of-place than anything else we had seen. We didn't notice right away because it something we weren't seeing.

Traffic.

We were ten or-so miles from a medium-sized city at the height of rush hour on a Monday morning, and there was no traffic. None!

“Is it some sort of holiday we forgot?” I asked my brother.

“There's some traffic on a holiday.”

True that. There would have been more traffic at 3AM... in Minot, North Dakota.

We were, in fact, the only car on the road. It was as if we were entering a shining, deserted crystal city. Combined with our lack of sleep, it was a truly bizarre experience.

It wasn't until we got off the expressway that we learned just how bizarre. The view down Goodman street normally went for a good half mile as it sloped up towards Highland Park, but all we could see were trees hanging so low they nearly brushed the pavement. Huge branches that had succumb to the weight of the ice lay in the street, some of them the size of trees themselves. We slowly drove around the debris on whichever side of the street was open. It was a war zone. 

There were no people to be found: no cars, no pedestrians, not a light in a single window or business, even the traffic lights were dark.

Had I been a bigger believer in the rapture, I might have been quite concerned.

We wound around the fallen arbor and drove carefully over the litter of smaller branches and broken bark towards my house. Goodman Street looked impassable, so we entered my street in the other direction from Clinton. A long branch blocked the entire street just a few doors from my own. We got out of the car and hobbled stiff-legged on the icy pavement. The air was still and dead without the usual sound of the city, but it was not quiet. The continual creaking of the ice covered trees was all around us. We made several attempts to move the branch but it was too big, too heavy, and our feet just slipped on the ice.

An old man came out on his porch. “Get inside!” he shouted pointing up at the other trees bending and groaning under the weight of the ice, “you could be killed!”

His point was made by a sharp gunshot sound a couple of blocks away, followed by the dramatic crash of a branch, an immense wooden chandelier and it's icy crystal hitting the ground.

We got back in the car, turned around and attempted an approach from Goodman again. Despite it's appearance, it was clear just far enough to get to the other end of my street and get to my house.

I carefully walked up the slick steps to my kitchen door and waved to my brother as he pulled out of the driveway to trek to his apartment about a mile-and-a-half away. Once inside, I knew there wouldn't be any power, but by instinct I hit the switch anyway.

Over 300,000 people were in the dark and cold. The trees and branches that had fallen had taken down many power lines in their path.

I learned later that the deserted streets were because of a general ban on all travel at that time. Had the police not been completely beleaguered with emergencies, we probably would have been stopped or road-blocked outside of Rochester somewhere.

In downtown Rochester, ten foot sheets of ice were falling off the glass windows of tall buildings making it perilous to walk below.

Disasters were declared in 19 counties in Upstate New York. Five percent of the states total power output had been taken out simply by the gentle accumulation of frozen water.

Forty miles to the South. A large tree in my parents' front yard, one I had climbed and swung from as a kid, had grown so heavy it toppled over, roots and all. It fell towards their house damaging the roof and pounding a four-by-four fence post straight and clean into the rain sodden earth like a hammer hitting a nail. It's presumably still there.

My folks were also without power for days.

It all started out as a novel adventure, for my Dad at least, who found great photographic opportunities exploring the surreal ice world. After a couple days when all the ice had melted leaving a typical brown and muddy March, and of living in the 19^th century, even he had had all the adventure he could stand.

My parents were luckier than some. They had wood stoves to cook on and heat their home with. Many ended up in shelters for days and weeks.

I myself got pretty handy with a chainsaw helping my dad dispose of his fallen tree. It was fortunate that he already owned one. Generators and chainsaws flew off the shelves of hardware and farm stores within hours. Batteries and other consumables disappeared from everywhere else.

It took over two weeks to restore power to all who had lost it in the storm. Power companies from several states and even Canada flocked to help in much publicized convoys.

The long-term damage was to the trees themselves. 

If you're not from the area, it's hard to appreciate the amount of Upstate New York that is covered and shaded by trees. Over 100,000 trees were completely destroyed. Many more times that were severely damaged. There was hardly a tree or shrub anywhere that had not been mangled in some way. For several years the damage was plain to see. Much was never recovered; people simply got used to the less green landscape and eventually forgot about the shady spots they'd lost.

The fallen and damaged trees and branches were collected by the city and taken to improvised dumping areas where they formed scores of house sized piles of wooden carnage.

That summer, everyone's gardens were covered with one of the only bounties of the ice storm: more free mulch than you could shake a stick at.

Ironically, for me, the whole thing was just a sweet deal. When I had flipped the switch after coming home that morning, the lights had come on!

I talked to my brother later that day. He asked me what I was going to do about my ex-roommate's delinquent power bill and RG&E turning off my power.

“Nothing,” I said, “they won't be able to even think about my new account, let alone turning off my power for at least a week.”

I did get them a copy of my lease and set up a new account, and I did it in my own sweet time.

Despite one of the biggest and longest power outages in Rochester history, I, the guy who was supposed to have his turned off, never lost mine.