Ice!

We had ice yesterday, or maybe it was just sleet or freezing rain, I still can't remember the difference. My mountain aerie was coated with a thin film of slipperiness. An indoor day then, and duck-walking carefully whenever venturing outside with Echo. Every plant and surface was encased in a shell of clear frozen water.

The first ice storm I ever saw was in Louisiana in January of 1982. Bill and I were living in my van in a campground off the "four-lane" in Broussard, between Lafayette and New Iberia. It's not really as bad as it sounds--there was simply no housing available for the swarm of northern workers fleeing the factory shut-downs in the Iron Belt. The license plates on the roads told the story of the Carter-years migration: Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania...

Bill had come from Illinois to New Iberia in the fall, close to desperation for a job advertised in the Armed Forces News. "If you come down, I'll talk to you, but that's all I can promise," the man said when Bill called. "I've got a guy who says he's coming from New York, but I ain't seen him yet." Bill took a chance, borrowed traveling money from his mom, and upon arriving, was immediately hired as the helicopter avionics mechanic, for a helo outfit servicing oil rigs in the Gulf. (His only other job that fall had been a one-day roustabout gig with a traveling circus in Southern Illinois. When he saw that the "meals included" caloric intake wouldn't begin to provide enough energy to do the physical work involved, he quit and hitchhiked back to his parents' house).

Once he was employed, he wrote to me and asked me to come and share his life. I was on my way back to the U.S. after spending months batting around New Zealand, Australia, Fiji and the Hawaiian Islands. I loved the man and thought we had a future together, but I hesitated once I was back in California. "I have people to see and things to do, " I said, "I've been gone for most of the past year." (I am scared to make the leap, I thought).

We negotiated on the phone for a few days. Finally exasperated, Bill told me "if you're not in Houston by the end of next week, I'm flying out to get you, I can't live without you anymore." I talked it over at dinner with my old housemates from college. "Are you KIDDING?" said Rich Rohan. "Do you know how rare and wonderful that is? If anyone had the courage to say that to me, I'd already be gone!" I loaded up my worldly goods the next day and drove east.

There really was no housing available, but there were jobs aplenty. One of Bill's co-workers referred to his abode out in the parking lot of the old WWII airstrip as the "Hotel Oldsmobile." Campgrounds were stuffed to double capacity by nightfall, emptying completely during the day when everyone commuted to work. One hardy soul in our park drove 2 x 4s into the ground, wrapped black plastic around the perimeter, and crawled inside to sleep on the ground at night.

The ice came in the night, the second week in January. By morning, the landscape was turned into a fairyland of sparkling crystal, every tree branch and blade of grass coated in clear ice, each one reflecting the stark winter sunlight like a prism. I was enchanted, spending the day shooting rolls of film, recording the marvel. By the third day, it wasn't so much novel as tedious. There wasn't a plow or salt-truck in the state, driving was a life-threatening terror and I was tired of burning my fingers with the Bic lighter, trying to defrost my door locks. All those northern vehicles came prepared with an ice scraper stashed under the seat--I had never seen one--and our neighbors taught me how to use it. In the evenings, passels of children streaked through the campground playing barefoot in the icy puddles, men huddled around campfires to keep warm, women with wet, stringy hair trudged and labored and cooked. It looked like a scene out of Grapes of Wrath.

Eventually, the ice wonderland melted, and life went back to our daily routine. While Bill worked during the day, I drove the back roads of the countryside looking for a more civilized place to live than my car. We were in the odd position of having money but being homeless. Bill took a one-day job on the weekend moving hospital beds, while I cooked dinner on the Coleman stove in the hospital parking lot. Apartments had 6-month waiting lists. I stopped in a country roadhouse one night to make a phone call to a realtor who was rumored to be renting houses short-term between the sale and closing. I left the bar without finding a place to live, but with a bartending job instead.

The next day, I decided that I would start talking to small-town librarians--who else would know people in town who owned property and might be willing to rent it out? I hit the jackpot on my first trip into the tiny town of St. Martinville, and within an hour, I was washing my hair in cold water at my own kitchen sink, getting ready for my first day at work. It was a dumpy, 2nd-floor apartment on the "wrong" side of town, but it would have heat and space and we wouldn't have to stand in line to use the bathroom. I felt like we had been delivered out of the 1930s Depression, and our life could begin at last.