Heightened awareness

The ice storm has been an experience of one of those extreme times of living when nature flexes her muscle. The beauty and destruction was intertwined.

I was awakened by loud, cracking sounds like gunshots echoing in the night. In the space between sleep and disturbed sleep, I wondered why there were hunters out shooting in the woods. Being a recent newcomer to North Carolina, to living among trees, I discovered in the morning it was the sounds trees make as they snap from the weight of solid ice weighing them past their capacity to sustain.

Those that remained transformed into huge, glistening pieces of glass, as did everything else outside. I was particularly drawn to an ice football left out on the back deck.

The day passed with continuing cracking and falling sounds piercing the silence and the occasional background sound of chain saws clearing driveways and roads of the limb and trunk debris. One of my car windows was broken. A large tree crossed the driveway and had to be sawed to let us pass.

During the first afternoon, after helping the family put perishables into coolers out on the porch and collect buckets of snow to flush toilets (it didn’t work because the snow didn’t melt in the coldness of the heatless house), I took a walk with my camera down our road off Jones Ferry.

The sky was almost colorless, leaning toward pale gray with that endless stretch of forest encased in ice set against it. Downed trees and limbs were lying about akimbo.

It felt excitingly dangerous out there. I had a sense of what it might be like to be a journalist or photographer in a war zone. I paid attention to the location of the cracking sounds and saw limbs fall, occasional treetops sail down and crash in a flurry of flying white ice. My awareness was more heightened that day than it has been in some time, and in a new way.

Later I went to stay at my other sister’s apartment, where she lives alone, since the sister and her family were all together here at the house where I live with them. Barbara had a fireplace there, as does the house here, but she also has a propane wall heater that kept us warm when the temperature dropped to 18 degrees the second night.

The phones were out, the cell towers either overused or down, no TV, no electric or water. We cooked simple food on a grill outside, talked, watched the fire dance, played Scrabble and, being engrossed by a book I had previously started, I read by flashlight long into the nights.

Mornings we had to haul water from the creek to flush the toilet. Five-gallon buckets get really heavy when filled. A friend from work had gas service, so she had hot water. My sister and I were invited to take a shower at her house that third day. We also refilled many plastic water bottles from her faucet.

Now clean and grateful, we went off to find food. University Mall had electricity, so after getting groceries, we decided to eat a hot meal before going home. Half the population had the same idea. There were lines and lines at all the places that were opened there and at Southpoint Mall.

We left, but on the way back home, stopping in Carrboro to pick up something, saw a handwritten note on Panzanella’s restaurant door listing delicious-sounding meals they would be serving until 5 p.m. Bouillabaisse, lamb stew, vegetable stew, spaghetti and meatballs: any of them with bread, $6. We went in.

They had no electricity, but the windows were large, letting in the late afternoon sun. The local neighborhood people and families who sat in sweaters and polar fleece and hats were of good cheer, eating steaming bowls of food, made in big pots on ranges with blue flames from gas fuel.

After our bowls were cleared we were told that the bakery at Weaver St. Market donated desserts that were going to spoil if not eaten soon, so complimentary desserts of banana pudding and vanilla cheesecake were offered to us. We didn’t refuse.

Ellen Giamportone Chapel Hill

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-- Anonymous, December 15, 2002