Snowbound, Let's Sleep in Today... (Blizzard of '78)
Ruslan malysh. Getty Images.Living in the Silk's bungalow was great until it wasn't. I was surprised a property that the Board of Health condemned was still listed for rent. I was lucky Marie was looking out for me and quickly found another place.
Pokey and I were acquaintances in high school until our senior year when our guidance counselor put us both in Mr. Bryant's film class. We were told it would be the easy credits we both needed to graduate. We were a couple of knuckleheads in a senior class full of knuckleheads and the only two seniors in that film class.
The class was a lot of fun. We watched classic black and white films starring Marlon Brando, Humphrey Bogart, Edward G Robinson, James Dean, and Montgomery Clift. And when they ended, Mr. Bryant always led a lively discussion.
For our final project, Mr. Bryant handed me and Pokey a movie camera the size of a bazooka and told us to create a short movie. We decided on a drug deal gone bad and a chase scene that ended in murder. Pokey had a hot rod Mustang, and I had an AMX, and we used 'em in the chase scene. Neither of us was the next Martin Scorsese, but it was a pretty entertaining film, which we named The Chase.
The first winter we worked together, it was just him and I and an F1300 dump truck we used to haul logs for firewood, and we plowed snow. We became inseparable, and I spent a lot of time at his house, where I got to know Marie and Joe, his dad, pretty well.
Marie was a wealth of knowledge, and she treated me like a second son. I remember her talking about eavesdropping and saying, "If it wasn't meant for my ears, I don't want to hear it." Throughout my life, when I'd overhear people talking about something that wasn't meant for my ears, I'd simply walk away.
Marie was tall and thin, and every morning, she ate a healthy slice of warm apple pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top, chasing it with a cup of coffee full of cream and sugar. When I called her out, she insisted it was a healthy breakfast. "It has fruit (apples), carbohydrates (pie crust), and vitamin D and calcium (ice cream and cream)." Her explanation changed the way I felt about pie a la mode for breakfast.
The in-law apartment was approximately 20' x 20' with a living room that spanned the entire length and was half the width of the apartment. On the opposite side of the apartment was a 10' x 10' bedroom, a galley kitchen, and a bathroom with a 5' cast iron tub. There were plenty of widows and cheap plastic shades covering all of them. It had electric heat, and Barney paid all utilities. The small mudroom at the entrance was perfect for removing dirty boots before entering, and there was a snow shovel in there as well.
When I walked in for the first time, I immediately had an allergy attack. There had been a cat in there for quite a few years, and the dander was embedded in the yellow shag carpet that filled the living room and bedroom. I had to shampoo it before I moved my stuff in. Fortunately, shag carpet was all the rage, and the convenience store in the center of town rented carpet shampoo machines. I rented one and shampooed the two rooms. After it dried, there was still a faint smell, so I did it again, and the smell was gone completely.
My girlfriend was in her first year of college and living in Boston in a dorm on Beacon Street by the Public Gardens when the snowstorm was first announced. A lot of weathermen underestimated the storm's potential at first, but by Sunday, they were all predicting a nor'easter that might be bigger than the one that flooded the bungalow a few weeks earlier on January 20th. That one dropped 21" in 12 hours and had wind gusts of up to 50 MPH. People thought that would be the memorable snowstorm of '78.
When the snow started to fall early on Monday, February 6, a lot of people attempted to get out of Boston in their cars. But the snow fell so fast, 4" per hour, and was accompanied by hurricane-force wind gusts that reached 83 MPH that many were forced to stop and abandon their vehicles on Route 128. Those who stayed in their cars with the heat on and their tailpipes covered by snow risked carbon monoxide poisoning. There were 99 deaths reported between Massachusetts and Rhode Island, some a result of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Boston Globe. Getty Images.All I cared about was my girlfriend. The phone lines were still working, but the trains were down, and there were power outages, so she had no way out of Boston. The school couldn't receive any food deliveries and was starting to run out of food.
I was trapped in my apartment. When I entered the mudroom to leave, the storm door was covered with snow and wouldn't budge. I removed the glass panel and started boring a hole through the snow, creating an opening not unlike one in an igloo.
It took me a while, but by the time I got out, I could only see snow. My car and Barney's blue Lesabre were both completely buried. A 15' snow drift covered the entrance to the apartment and the roof above it.
Two days later, the trains were running again, and my girlfriend got on an Amtrak headed for Sharon. I told her I'd meet her at the train station and that the roads were still closed and we'd have to walk two miles to her house.
Only emergency/essential vehicles were allowed to travel on the snow-packed roads, but people with snowmobiles were buzzing around town, and no one was telling them they couldn't. There weren't enough plows, dump trucks, and front-end loaders to clear the snow. It was reported that Boston and Providence had 21" of snow, but in Sharon and parts of Massachusetts, it was closer to three feet. Add in the wind-blown snow drifts, and almost everything was buried under a blanket of fresh snow.
Traveling by train was dangerous in those conditions, and I hurried down to the train station on foot, hoping my girlfriend would arrive safely…
Everything in Massachusetts had been put on pause; we were all snowbound, and despite our fears, it was a peaceful time that brought people together in a way I had never seen before…
To be continued…
*All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental…