Winter and all that

Arkansas is pretty much white with snow and ice today, mostly ice so far. Winter storms bring great grandeur, but sometimes problems as well.

Around 1961 Northeast Texas got one of those every-so-many-years grandaddy ice storms. Schools, businesses, companies were closed. Ice covered all roads. Nothing moved but the mail, and carriers were careful and late.

Daddy was a millwright helper at Lone Star Steel then. Right after the last official world war, Daddy went to work as a mechanic at Red River Army Depot. Most depot work was repairing vehicles damaged during the war. Daddy once mentioned working on a Sherman tank that took an 88mm hit. "You couldn't put your hand any place inside without touching shrapnel," he said. More accurately, all that metal sticking to the inside of the tank was spall, but the idea is the same. Daddy quit the depot around 1955 and went to work at the steel mill. He and Momma moved from Boston, Texas, to a big old house west of Omaha, right on the Morris County-Titus County line. After a time there, we moved to a house a few miles closer to Omaha, and then to the last place I grew up in, just north of the Rocky Branch community. Rocky Branch had a store, two churches and maybe a half dozen houses.

Our house was the first house on the left going north toward Omaha. That was the first house we lived in with indoor plumbing. Before then, we drew water from a well, heated bath water on the stove, bathed in a galvanized tub and used an outhouse for the other necessity. The house had a fireplace and a space heater in the living room and a small space heater in the bathroom. In deep winter we closed all the doors, making the living room, the kitchen and the bathroom the only heated rooms.

For a time we five kids slept in the same room -- Carolyn, Francis and Patty in a bed, while Bill and I slept on a let-down couch. Then Bill and I got older and Momma and Daddy made the dining room our bedroom, with a real bed.

That bad winter, Daddy decided he, Bill and I should go for a walk in the woods west and southwest of the house, see what the ice looked like. We each put on long handle wool underwear and jeans, two shirts, two pairs of socks, coat and gloves and wrapped our heads and necks and went outside.

Everything was covered in ice -- trees, grass, the house, electric lines, the car and the pickup. Whatever movie you might have seen with ice ... That is how it all looked.

We walked to the barbed wire gate, frozen grass crunching underfoot, through the gate and past the barn, everything white and everything cold. We went into the woods a short distance from the barn, on a dirt path, and when in the woods we heard cracking noises, similar to gun fire. "What's that?" I asked. Daddy said, "It's limbs breaking from the weight of the ice."

The woods were picture postcard, landscape painting lovely. If you have not seen all things frozen, everything with an inch of ice, covering you have missed a natural wonder.

That was the biggest ice storm I have ever seen, more ice than the Christmas Day 200o storm that swept across Northeast Texas and Southeast Oklahoma and Southwest Arkansas. The 2000 storm caused much more damage, especially since civilization now is more dependent on electricity. The 2000 storm was the perfect combination of temperature and rainfall, with water freezing in the tops of trees and limbs broken or stripped from trunks by the weight of the ice. Trees in some places looked exactly like World War II pictures of wooded areas after artillery tree bursts. Following the 2000 ice storm, towns were without power for days, and some rural areas went 30 days with no electricity.

I can do without cold.