A Light Dusting

Blizzard of 1993

All anyone can talk about this morning is snow.  Well, not just snow. They’re talking about ice.

Once again the people of the south are scurrying like ants at the mere mention of a dusting of snow or a bout with freezing rain. The weathermen opened their portfolios last night and invested all they had into milk and bread before going on the air today. By the time you read this you could head over to the nearest Publix or WalMart and you’d find a wasteland devoid of all life on the aisle where the toilet paper was once stocked. The only bread that you’ll be able to find will be onion rolls. And the milk case will only be stocked with low-fat whipping cream.

Our friends to the north get a kick out of it every year. They see us clamoring to stock our shelves and to find a reliable heat source during the unavoidable month of darkness that is coming and they laugh until their cheese-shaped hats fall off. While we are worried about a quarter of an inch of ice they’ll be lighting their barbecue grills in snow up to their hips.

We get it, guys. It’s funny. I think it’s funny, too. However, I have the unfortunate ability to recall the past and I realize why we do it. Next time that you’re in Alabama, find someone that looks like they’ve lived there for a long period of time. Go up to that person. Ask them if they remember the blizzard of 1993.

The lights will dim. A soft glow will illuminate their face. Their eyes will squint so that you can’t even see them anymore. Suddenly their skin will look worn and cracked. They’ll look off into the distance and they’ll mutter, “Aye”.

If you lived through it then you remember it. The ol’ ‘93 blizzard was probably similar to a regular snow storm that parts of the northeast get every year. The problem is that this is the deep south. We rarely get below freezing for more than eight hours. So the fact that we had over a foot of snow dumped on us in one night was debilitating. 

We don’t have snow shovels. We don’t have slow blowers. No one salts the roads. And worst of all...we have lots and lots of trees. Trees tend to have limbs that break off when they get a lot of snow on them. Those limbs tend to land on power lines.

Imagine living in a place where no one really has a need for anything more than an electric furnace in their house and then half the state is without power.

We went to live with my grandparents for a few days. They had a gas heater in their den and their stove was gas so we could at least cook a few things. That is until my grandmother put the food out on the porch to keep it from going bad and the dogs treated it as their own personal buffet.

I had never seen that much snow before and it is something that I haven’t seen since. We could walk across the acres of fields on my grandparents property and as we walked back our footprints would already be filled in. And even though I was only a couple of months from my sixteenth birthday...we played like small children in that fluffy white stuff.

Anything that we could find became a sled. And when we ran out of options we just packed the snow on the hill as much as we could and slid down on our backsides. My mom wasn’t too fond of that since the dryer wasn’t working.

As much fun as we had over the several days that it took for our temperature to rise above freezing and let us get back to normal, it did kind of create a state-wide PTSD. People died during that storm. A lot of people. There were homeless people in Birmingham that froze to death as they tried to take shelter under bridges and in bus stop sheds. There were people that didn’t realize they weren’t supposed to use their generator inside the house and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. And there were the ones that fell asleep and didn’t notice that their kerosene heaters or fireplaces had sparked and they died in the resulting blaze.

For us it was a few days of frolicking in the snow with the inconvenience of not watching TV, eating a lot of PB&J, and having to share a foldout bed with my mom and my brother. But for the state as a whole it was a lesson in preparedness. We don’t let those storms sneak up on us anymore. While we haven’t had one like that since, we treat every snow event as another potential ‘93.

We sand the roads now. And we provide a free shelter for anyone to go to if they don’t have heat. And we always get to the grocery store early to get milk and bread.

We can’t go without our milk sandwiches.