Fighting Ice

As it turns out, if it snows a lot, then rains a little on top of it, it won’t go away until things get warmer.

That’s my theory, anyway. I won’t be able to say for sure until things get warmer, if they ever do. Hope is found in it always having gotten warmer before. But we live in strange and troubling times.

If you didn’t experience it, surely you heard about the storm that was visited upon the south and east 10 days ago more or less. Parts of the south got so much ice that most of the trees and just about all of the power lines were damaged or destroyed. The east got very large amounts of snow. Officials in New York and Washington say they’re confident they’ll have much of it cleared away by late April or early May. The mayor of New York, an idiot, says the warmth of collectivism will bring the thaw, as it did a century ago in Siberia.

The storm here was a perfect example of why we mustn’t get cocky. It was predicted that we would get up to a foot of snow, beginning about 7 a.m. Saturday before last. Then 7 a.m. Saturday before last came and went. No snow. Same at noon and 6 p.m. and midnight. At about 1 a.m. a few very light flakes appeared. When the sun rose there was an inch or two of the fluffiest snow you ever saw, stuff that would better respond to a broom than a shovel.

It continued lightly throughout that day, Sunday before last. It totaled five inches at worst. No real problem.

Ah, but then . . .

The temperature rose just a little above freezing. the light snow turned to light rain. It hit the snow, which absorbed but then froze it. After it had been doing this for a while it stopped and that was that.

How bad could it be?

Very bad, we quickly learned.

The temperature declined such that it had not reached freezing from then until the day before yesterday — and even that happened in a way that made things worse, not better. Most nights were below zero Fahrenheit, but some nights it was far below zero. It is said that it will be slightly better, for a short time, later this week. Car batteries, including mine, froze. I did get the car to start one afternoon, and ran it with the heater going for a while. That let me get the slabs of ice, an inch and a half thick and the consistency of styrofoam, with a few inches of snow underneath, off the car. But then it got colder at night and the car remained at the end of the driveway until Monday, when AAA dropped by. It took 30 seconds, tops, to get it started.

We had been warned that the apocalypse was coming, so before the storm hit I stocked up on food. Fortunately, I already had a good supply here, because rather than enough for two or three days — the most needed in the 21 years I’ve lived here — I ended up being housebound for eight days.

Nor was going outside advisable. The styrofoam crust was the worst possible thickness. It was not easily crunched through, as it would have been were it any thinner, nor was it thick enough to support one’s weight. You’d stomp through it, but then your boot would catch on the edge of it and down you would go. This made going down the steep driveway a true adventure.

But relatively flat places were no joy, either. The picture at the top of the page was made Sunday night, after the full moon rose. I’ve traipsed around in deep snow there, making pictures of the moonlight, many times before without the slightest problem. In this case, the exposure was one and one-half seconds, difficult to hand-hold but if you’re crouched down and braced, and hold your breath, you can do it. So I crouched down, made several pictures, and stood up.

Stood up too quickly, as it happened, and holding my breath had done me no favors, either. It made me slightly dizzy, and l Iost my balance. I needed to take a step to regain my balance. That slab of styrofoam covering the yard had other ideas.

After a few decades of photography one learns to protect the camera, which I did, so down I went, one arm more or less trapped under the icy crust. I did (obviously) escape eventually, but the whole thing left me frozen and out of breath. Enjoy the picture!

The weather forecasting has not been precise, and precision was wanted. It’s not, in practical terms, a big deal whether it’s 20 or 25 degrees, or 70 or 75 degrees. There’s a considerable distinction, though, between 30 and 35 degrees, because at 35 the snow can melt and at 30 it can’t.

I have a theory about weather forecasters. I think that they feel an obligation to keep us from giving way to despair. That’s why during oppressive summer heat you’ll always hear that the heatwave will be broken the middle of next week. But as time passes, the relief keeps moving, mirage-like, just out of reach but getting here real soon now. The last few weeks we have had a tremendous cold spell in much of the country. A week ago they said the warm spell would be here in a week.

Which it really wasn’t. Yes, it did get up to 39 degrees at my house Tuesday. You know what happened then? It rained a little, re-slippery-fying the icy styrofoam. Then it snowed a little atop that. Half a day of relative warmth made things worse, because it all quickly froze again. The same thing is expected Friday.

Though it may be just to mollify those gathered around the weather office with pitchforks and torches, it is now claimed that it will be warmer for real, for a few days one after another — as you might guess, a week from now. (It is good to remember, if we have paid attention at any time during our entire lives, that it is nigh impossible to predict the weather a week in advance. But we’re desperate, and if they say it will be in the 40s next Tuesday, we’ll take it.)

As I’ve mentioned before, and my personal experience supports the research, in the winter you’re far less likely to contract respiratory viruses and colds if you keep indoor humidity at or close to 42 percent. Let me add now that the colder it is outside, the more difficult it becomes to maintain that level of moisture in the air.

Our houses are not sealed tight. This is a good thing because otherwise we would suffocate. But it also lets warm air and moisture escape, and while we have furnaces and fireplaces to restore the warmth, we need humidifiers to replenish the humidity. For the last 10 days, which were constantly below freezing and often below zero, I’ve had five — not a typo, five of the things — humidifiers operating at full tilt, and even then, when it was especially cold, it was impossible to keep the humidity much above 30 percent. This is in some measure my fault.

That’s because humidifiers, the good but inexpensive ones, put moisture in the air by sucking air through a big, thick wick that soaks up water from a reservoir. But those filters over time get clogged with dust in the air and minerals in the water. (They may also grow things in them, though I think they’re designed to discourage the growth of bugs and mushrooms and other stuff we don’t want to be breathing.) When you get a humidifier, the instructions will tell you that the wick, sometimes called a filter, needs to be replaced every few months. I didn’t replace mine from last year.

Last year it never got this cold, and I had a spare, unused humidifier identical to the others. When the air dried out despite the gadgets a week ago, I broke out the new one. And I discovered that it needed to be refilled twice as often as the others, meaning that it was pumping twice as much water into the air.

So replacing the filters does indeed matter. I quickly ordered replacements for the others. They’ll arrive just as the need for them diminishes.

I was able to order them because of the cold spell’s one happy surprise: both the power and the internet stayed on. (Well, so far — as I said, we mustn’t get cocky.)

This meant, too, that I was able to watch my trick home-made television. Normally, I have the news on most of the time, but watching the news so far this year has been endlessly dreary. Additionally, if you switch between what’s left of CNN and the abysmal Fox Trump Channel you’d think they originated on different planets. It’s fraud, really, for either of them to call itself news.

I said hell with it, with the weather everything was already bad enough, and I went exploring. And deep in the thousands — really — of stations I can receive I found a strange Delaware station that carries what it calls “MainStreet Television.” It is old stuff and it is bizarre. Some of the time it carries terrible shows; the final Lucille Ball series, which is awful, I think, runs for an hour at 2 a.m. “The Beverly Hillbillies,” a show that ran for years on basically one joke, is on in the afternoons. But at other times it got interesting.

For instance, I found the pilot episode of “The Rifleman.” The guest star was a very young Dennis Hopper. The script was written by Sam Peckinpah. It was well worth the time. Later, I found a weird noir murder mystery, “Fear in the Night,” which was the starring debut of one DeForest Kelley; the generations of “Star Trek” fans cannot imagine his ever having been a romantic lead, but he was. If you’ve seen “Star Trek,” you might, as I did, find the movie kind of embarrassing.

There is a lot of old television that you have probably never heard of on that strange Delaware station (which never does a proper station ID or gives its call letters). Do you remember “26 Men,” the story of the Arizona Rangers, who actually existed around the turn of the Twentieth Century? Didn’t think so. How about “Man with a Camera,” starring Charles Bronson as a crime-solving photographer? No? Well, what about “Public Defender,” the saga of those brave lawyers who get crooks off the hook?

But it’s not all serious. There is also “Buffalo Bill, Jr.,” one of the stupidest ideas ever to make in into production: two children were the only survivors of an Indian raid on a wagon train. For reasons unknown, neither seems to remember his and her name, so their rescuer, Judge Ben “Fair and Square” Wiley — stay with me here — named them “Buffalo Bill Jr.” and “Calamity” (because what little girl wouldn’t want a synonym for “disaster” as her name?).

There are, too, some classics you may have heard of: “Jim Bowie,” “Annie Oakley,” very early episodes of “The Roy Rogers Show,” and more. There is a British influence as well, with “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” (memorable theme song, in its entirety: “Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen. Robin Hood, Robin Hood, with his band of men. Feared by the bad. Loved by the good. Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood.” I imagine it took me longer to type it just now than it took to write). I had heard of all of those, but not “The Buccaneers,” which was an interesting surprise in that it starred Robert Shaw, famous to everyone as Quint in “Jaws” and to those with taste as Doyle Lonnegan in “The Sting.” (Actually, I see now that he was hugely accomplished, having for instance written the stunning play, “The Man in the Glass Booth.” And he lived to be only 51.)

Poking around online, I see that anyone who wants to can stream most or all of the above for free. That’s good, because it would be a long and difficult job for me to try to explain how to find the nameless television station where, thanks to being snowed in, I saw them all.

While watching them and waiting for next week’s alleged thaw, it occurred to me that Joe Biden is from Delaware and this might be his local television station.

It would explain a lot.