Early last week our area got about a foot of snow on top of a layer of freezing rain and sleet. But our family was very comfortable being shut in. The electricity stayed on, we had plenty of food (pancakes two days in a row!), we had heat, and the toilets flushed because our water worked.
All of those comforts weren’t the case for me during every snowstorm. Seeing so much snow, especially at the beginning of February, took me back in time, to almost exactly 40 years earlier.
The snowstorm was not predicted
On January 30, 1982 St. Louis experienced what’s known in these parts as the Snowstorm of 1982. For me, that ordeal began just like any other Saturday night. I was at my father and stepmother’s house for the weekend. They lived on several acres in rural Jefferson County, Missouri (I still don’t understand why they lived there, they enjoyed none of what would make living on an acreage fun – but I suppose that’s a topic for another blog). Anyway, the next morning we’d be going to church, and after that and lunch, my dad would drive me back to my mom’s house in an old suburb. I’m pretty sure I watched “Love Boat” that night just like every Saturday night. I think I recall hearing right before I went to bed, that flurries were predicted, but I didn’t think anything of it.
A foot of snow overnight
However, I distinctly remember what happened the next morning. My stepmother woke me, and stood in the doorway to tell me that we wouldn’t be going to church because it had snowed – about a foot – overnight. I remember being excited. I couldn’t remember it ever snowing that much. Plus, no church? What fun! I ran to the window and looked outside. The snow had transformed everything. An old wooden box had a foot of snow on top of it. Seeing all the snow was amazing.
We had breakfast and then my dad and stepmother suggested we all go play in the snow. I didn’t have any snow boots, so they gave me bread bags to put over my shoes. They worked surprisingly well at keeping the snow out of my shoes. I remember tromping through the snow in the wooded area in front of their house. We had a good time for a while, trekking through the woodsy area in front of the house. I had a tame snowball fight with my 5-year-old half sister. It was quite cold though, so we didn’t stay out long.
So that first day was fairly fun. But the gravel road my father and stepmother lived on was not maintained by the county, so of course no plows came through (again, I don’t understand why they lived in the woods, but topic for another time). At some point on that first day, I realized I didn’t know when I’d be able to go home, but I figured it would be fairly soon.
Like stepping back in time
And then the electricity went off. As I said, the house was in a rural area, and electricity pumped water out of the underground well. So no electricity, no water. We wouldn’t go thirsty — there was water in the water softening tank, plus plenty of snow outside — but but we couldn’t flush the toilets or just turn on the faucet for water. The heat was also electric, so there was no heat. My father made a fire in the fireplace in the living room and that’s what kept the house warm.
It was all very Little House on the Prairie, but without the fiddle-playing and the fun times. Since I was only at my dad’s on the weekends, I didn’t have many toys there, and I was getting too old to play with toys anyway. So there wasn’t much to do. I do remember writing up a little newspaper though. Of course the main story was about the snowstorm, lol. The days went by slowly.
No contact with the outside world
The phone also stopped working so there was no way to contact my mother. I didn’t know it at the time, but my mother was freaking out that she couldn’t reach us. She contacted our church, which was in town about 20 miles away. No one had heard from us since before the storm. She also called the sheriff’s department about us multiple times. As mothers are known to do, she was imagining that all sorts of horrible things had happened to us.
Rescued!
On Wednesday afternoon, the phone finally started to work again. I talked to my mother, and I remember running to the bathroom and sobbing after I got off the phone with her. My stepmother was uncharacteristically nice and hugged me.
Now that the phone was working, they talked with some friends from their church. The friends agreed to come out and drive us out.
They came the next day in a 4×4 and attached a tow cable or rope to my dad’s sedan. We began a very scary drive through a foot of unplowed snow. There was an incline on one side of the road, and I was petrified we were going to slide over it.
But we made it to the plowed county road, and we had no other problems on the 60-mile drive to my home. I was never so happy as I was to walk through our front door. Because of the snow, school had been out while I was gone, and it was out the next day also. I enjoyed the next few days before school started again the following Monday.
Being grateful
I’ve always been annoyed that I was stuck in the middle of nowhere during that snowstorm instead of in town with my mom. My younger sister and I would have had such fun playing in the snow. When we came inside my mom would have implored us to stand on the heating vent to get toasty warm. Plus, I could have walked across the street and visited a friend.
But last week as I watched my younger dog run across the snowy backyard toward my daughter, I was filled with gratitude, for electricity, running water, and my loving family members.
Gina Parsons - Writer 