| Meme Depot : Writing: "A Little Rain Never Hurt No One" | ||||||
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"A Little Rain Never Hurt No One" by Glenn Grant In January 1998, an unprecedented Extreme Weather Event knocked out power to a vast region, stretching from eastern Ontario, through Montreal and south into New York, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. Once the lights came back on, I composed and posted this "I'm okay" e-mail to my friends and family. David Hartwell kindly published it in The New York Review of Science Fiction #115 (March 1998). The version below has been expanded somewhat.
Tuesday, 13 January, 1998: Welcome to the everyday catastrophe. Power has at last been restored here at Place Bizarre. What we ironically call "Life" is slowly returning to what might be called "normal." As late as Thursday (8 January), my roomies and I were still able to watch the disaster unfold on TV, smug in the knowledge that our downtown Montreal neighbourhood might actually squeak through relatively unscathed. A friend, A.J., was on his way from Dorval, where his parents' house had been without power or heat for three days. He took some time to arrive; the Metro was out, while many streets were impassable, full of shattered trees, unploughed snow, and scattered chunks of ice. The slow, graceless collapse of our technological infrastructure... All too much like one of my more apocalyptic short stories. It had started a week earlier, two or three days into the New Year, with a major snowstorm. We've had so much snow this winter that the Montreal Urban Community had already spent half its annual snow-removal budget. So City Council looked at the weather forecast and saw that by Monday the 5th we were in for above-freezing temperatures and lots of rain. We'll save some money, they said; clear the major thoroughfairs, but leave the rest of the snow where it is. It'll all be melted and washed away on Monday anyway, right? Didn't turn out that way. Monday brought temperatures just above freezing, and thus a beautiful glaze of freezing rain -- or verglace as they call it 'round here. So the week began with all that snow still on the ground and, like everything else, under a thickening shellac of verglace. Quebec's vast network of power transmission lines began to collapse, high-tension cables snapping, steel pylons buckling under unprecedented ice loads. The Island of Montreal is fed by five separate transmission lines. Only one line was still in service, and Hydro Quebec had to shut down sectors of town on a rotating basis, to keep the strain from bringing down what was left of the system. Meanwhile, the verglace just kept a comin', right through Monday and into Tuesday. Wednesday, it warmed up just enough to cause fog to rise, which of course froze onto everything it touched. Ice fog. The city ground to a halt. Many people stayed home from work. Families huddled around fireplaces. Schools were converted into crowded shelters. Three bridges over the St Lawrence River were closed. The Metro trains crawled through their tunnels at less than half speed. By the time A.J. got here on Thursday, we had gone dark. Slipped quietly into the growing black hole that is the Montreal Triangle. My roommate, Dominic, just returning from work, had one foot in the elevator when the lights went out.... Thursday night, just below freezing outside; our building was still relatively habitable. Then our water pressure began to drop. The local pumping stations had lost power. We started filling containers with what we could get out of the taps before they went dry. Dominic was worried about his pet iguana. Every few hours for the next couple of days, Dom boiled water on our gas stove, filling plastic tubs which he placed into the Cold Blooded One's glass tank. Thank the gods for endothermy, I thought, and picked up my other roomie's acoustic Samick. Strumming old Billy Bragg songs in candlelight, accompanied by the crackle of the wind through ice encrusted branches, the distant crashing of broken-backed trees.... Friday night: squirrelly after two days of electronic media deprivation, we went looking for signs of surviving night life, accompanied by Terry, a member of the Free Fall Iguanas sketch comedy troupe. No, really. A.J. was a founding member of the troupe, and I've written sketches for them. So we three Iguanas ventured out into the cold and dark. The central business district was mostly dead, only a few towers running on emergency generators. We wandered through a chaotic mess of branches, deep slush, and vast puddles. Every few meters, another astonishing found sculpture: street furniture coated by a long blast from Mr. Freeze's ice gun; phonebooths seemingly encased in Lucite; something half-melted and refrozen that used to be a bicycle; Norman Bethune's statue, unrecognizable under a thick mask of ice. All the trees and shrubs had been mysteriously replaced with glass replicas, all bent double, genuflecting to the passing green military transports and road graders. Bleeping, grumbling, howling, the noise of the snow removal machines echoed for blocks along otherwise quiet streets. Down St-Laurent, every second block was without power, but we found an open resto-bar. Lots of Army personnel in the crowd, everyone telling survival stories, a creepy sense of impending doom as yet more freezing rain swooped down on the darkened skyline. A definite wartime atmosphere. Could have been a British pub at the height of the Blitz, if not for the soundtrack by Radiohead, Prodigy, and Blur. On the way home, we watched huge slabs of ice drop off the walls of the dark office towers and hotels, crashing to bits in the streets below. Off in the distance, brilliant flashes lit up the sky, sometimes blue, sometimes red-orange: flashovers caused by shorted high-voltage power lines. Throughout the night, the sporadic noise of branches snapping, ice collapsing off buildings or trees, sounding at times like a distant artillery barrage, or a careless air-drop of delicate wine glasses. Saturday: Dorval came back on-line, so A.J. and I decamped to his parents' suburban house. I'd hoped to be back home within 24 hours, but in fact the downtown power grid didn't come up again until 4:30 Monday morning. At dinner with A. J.'s generous family -- and a few others from among the temporarily homeless -- I was reminded of a line from one of my short stories: "We are all refugees. The truth of the old cliche has never fully struck home before...." Now back home and on-line, there's e-mail from Southern California: "You mean all this was caused merely by ice? We just had an earthquake, and the damage is nothing like what you've got." Here's hoping that civilization still exists where you are, Glenn |
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content ©2004 Glenn Grant except as noted |
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