I found good knives at Cabela’s, but rode my bike to Bed, Bath & Beyond anyway for better chef’s knives. I was riding my bike more often at this point because I found the exercise made me feel better. I’d even found one of those covered bike trailers for little children to drag behind my bike for Rowdy to ride in when I went somewhere so he wouldn’t have to run. He liked it. He would curl up and take a nap while I pedaled us the six miles or so into east Madison.
By this point, my scavenging had ranged all over the Madison area and surrounding towns. I was certain that there was no one else alive in southern Wisconsin at this point, but I put up my handwritten flyers in windows, anyhow. I continued to gather supplies, especially drinking water, whenever I found them. I was confident that I would manage winter well.
The first real snowstorm was an eye-opening experience. Sometimes in Wisconsin, we can get a good storm that dips temperatures and drops a fair amount of snow well before real winter. This sort of snow usually melts a week later and leads into a nice Indian Summer for a couple of weeks before winter really hits, though. As I said before, it was late October or early November. That’s usually still fall weather here. It gets cold at night, sometimes dipping below freezing, but usually warms up to the high 50’s or low 60’s during the day. As a kid, I hated those days because my mom would make me wear my winter coat to school in the morning, but in the afternoon the winter coat would be far too warm and I’d have to carry it. The first snowstorm came in the evening. I had noticed the clouds on the horizon in the afternoon, but I didn’t expect it to snow that day. It still felt too early for snow.
I had a fire in the hearth and was sitting in front of it, enjoying its warmth. I was reading by the light of an LED camp lantern from Cabela’s that ran on D batteries, but promised hundreds of hours of use from those batteries. It gave a nice, steady, bright light. Rowdy was on the floor near the fire sleeping, as an older dog was wont to be. I could tell he really enjoyed the fires because he had taken to sleeping on a dog bed near the fire that I’d gotten for him, instead of on my bed in the corner furthest from the heat. I hadn’t been looking out the windows. With the sun setting so early in the day, all I would see is darkness anyhow. At some point, Rowdy roused himself and gave his pee-pee whine. I put down my book and stood to take him outside. We walked into the main body of the library and I noticed that it was cold. Like, horribly cold. I could see my breath. With the doors of the annex area closed, the heat from the fire wasn’t going much beyond that room. The hearth wasn’t overly large, so I couldn’t build a fire big enough to heat the entire library anyhow, but this drop in temperature was disconcerting.
I opened the doors to let Rowdy into the night to do his business, and a gust of wind blew me backwards and took the breath from my mouth as I did. It was icy outside. As a Wisconsinite, I know cold. I know that the snow usually falls between 27 and 33 degrees, and that’s a cold that’s chilly, but not cold. That first snowfall, it was cold, in the teens, with a bitter wind from the northwest that dropped the temperatures into the single digits. I enjoy snowfalls when it’s near 30 and there’s no wind; the snow falls in fat, fluffy flakes and turns the landscape into a Currier & Ives painting. The snow that was falling was tiny beads of razor-ice, the kind that stings the face when it strikes.
Rowdy, being an older dog and not one to mess around when it comes to cold, hurried through his bladder relief and ran back inside, past me, to the fire. I closed the library door and barred it with the four-by-four I’d rigged to keep the doors locked from the inside. I went to the bathroom to do my own business and found that the temperature in the bathrooms was even colder than the rest of the library. My butt nearly froze to the seats! I looked at the five-gallon buckets of water I’d been carting inside from my water collection tanks (which were surely frozen by now), and realized that they might all freeze in that bathroom.
Two by two, I carted the water buckets into the annex and put them in the far corner, opposite my bed. As I carried the last of the six buckets into the annex, my mind drifted to the massive pile of bottled water that I’d been storing in the main body of the library, just outside the annex doors. Would it freeze if I left it there? The thought was too tragic to comprehend: countless bottles of water cracked and broken as the ice swelled the thin plastic and split it. I might lose all my convenient drinking water! I dug through the supply crates and found an indoor/outdoor thermometer in one of them. I set it up on top of the stack of water and closed the annex door. In an hour, I went out and checked on it. The indicator dial had dropped almost to forty-two. That wasn’t in danger of freezing, but it was close. Would it get colder overnight? Could it freeze if I didn’t try to heat the library by opening the doors? And if I did open the doors, how cold would the annex get? Could I afford to burn the necessary amount of logs it would take? My resources were not infinite. I had to be cautious at every turn.
I debated pros and cons with myself. I didn’t particularly feel like moving all the water into the annex, especially since I’d moved the racks of DVDs and CDs to make room for the water in the library’s main body. It was also nice that the temperature was dropping to near refrigerator levels. A tall bottle of ice-cold water would be nice after a summer of drinking that stuff at room temperature. Still, I couldn’t risk my drinking water.
I decided to continue to wait. I didn’t sleep. I sat up and read a book. When I started to nod off, I forced myself to do push-ups and jog in place until I wasn’t tired anymore. Every so often, I went out to check the thermometer. It dropped to forty degrees even, and stayed there. I was worried, though. The temperatures in January and February could get brutal in Wisconsin. Twenty or thirty below was not out of the question. Wind chills of sixty below were possible.
Eventually, I let myself drift off and catch a few hours of rest, but I snapped awake long before I was fully rested. I went back out to check on the water. It seemed okay, several degrees above freezing. The cold had plateaued in the main body of the building for now. I knew that if I had to, I could open the doors to the annex and gain some heat in the area of the water bottles, but I didn’t want to do that unless I had to. It would sap too much heat from the annex, cost too many logs.
I crawled back to my bed and laid there thinking. I thought about all the bottles of soda and cans of food that would be freezing in stores all over the state. All my supplies and marked locations would be useless. Surviving the apocalypse just got more difficult. As if I needed that.
The snow fell all night. I woke to a bitterly cold morning with a landscape painted white and covered with snowdrifts. The road in front of the library was completely obscured. It was odd to see a world where snowplows were not out in force keeping the roads clear. Everything was covered. I was more or less trapped in the library. The U-Haul truck was too big and bulky to be a safe mode of transportation in the snow, and the Chevy Cruze Eco was too small to break drifts and maintain safe contact with the road. I would be more likely to strand that little car than I would be to get back and forth. I needed something that I could use in snow.
I broke out the winter gear I’d taken from Cabela’s. I put on a pair of warm hunter’s snow pants, and over that, I wore a thick parka with a good hood. I had a knit cap and expensive gloves (not that they cost me anything), and a top-of-the-line pair of Sorrels. I remembered seeing something online that said, “There’s no such thing as too cold; you’re only wearing the wrong clothes.” There was no chance of me wearing the wrong clothes here. I was wearing better winter gear than I’d ever owned while living in Wisconsin. When I stepped out of the library that morning, the arctic wind bit at the skin on my face, but everywhere else I was quite comfortable, even when trudging through the deep snow.
The drifts rose to knee-high, but the main concentration of snow cover barely met the tops of my feet. It was a minor storm by Wisconsin standards. If there had been plows and other people, this one wouldn’t have even fazed us. My dad used to brag to his friends who lived down south
that in Wisconsin, two inches of snow meant we switched to orange balls instead of white when we played golf. He wasn’t over exaggerating. People pride themselves about how they deal with snow in this state and we openly mock other states for their panic over snow amounts that wouldn’t even close school here.
I went from house-to-house looking for someone with a snowmobile in their garage. I only had to go to about eight houses before I finally found a guy with two newer-looking Arctic Cats in the third garage stall of his house. They weren’t even on a trailer, so it took only a few minutes of work to take the cover off of one, make sure it had oil, fill it with gas, and then prime it and start it. I lucked out here. Last winter, my parents took me to spend a few days with some family friends who had rented a cabin near Eagle River, Wisconsin--the snowmobile capital of the world. They had taught me how to drive snowmobiles. It was nice to have that knowledge in my back pocket now. I tried the helmets the guy had in the garage, but my head was too large for all of them. I would have to get a helmet from somewhere. Probably Cabela’s, again. Maybe the Farm & Fleet on Highway 51. I had no idea if there was another store that might have helmets. In the short drive from that guy’s garage to the library, I was quickly reminded of why a good full-face helmet is a must for riding snowmobiles. The wind chill on my cheeks was almost unbearable. I had to ride with my head dipping below the fairing to minimize the burn.
The snowmobile would allow me to get around town quickly when I needed to, but I had no trailer for Rowdy. Rowdy was good in short bursts, following me around in the snow. The two blocks from the library and back were no real struggle for him, but he was an older dog. He was going to have to stay in the library when I went on runs. I put him back in library and closed the door. I could hear him whining and scratching. Since the tornado, he had not wanted to leave my side. It broke my heart to leave him in the library now, but I had no other options at the moment.
I drove to Cabela’s alternately screaming into the wind as I bore the cold on my face and trying to let some of the vent exhaust from the engine feebly keep me warm below the windshield. By the time I got to the store, I was numb from the neck up and my cheeks and eyelids burned like fire..
As usual, Cabela’s was my savior: I found a good helmet to protect my face. I didn’t find a good trailer for the dog, though. The trailers they had were for wild game. The snowmobile treads would spit snow back on whatever was being dragged behind it, and I knew Rowdy wouldn’t like that. I was going to need a trailer when I tried hunting, though. And Rowdy certainly couldn’t go along for that. I would need stealth and having a bounding Labrador who wasn’t trained as a gun dog wouldn’t help in the least.
When got back to the library with the game trailer and the Arctic Cat, I borrowed the garage of the house nearest to the library to park the Cat. I didn’t want to have to fish the sled out of the snow when I needed it, and since I knew the garage had an empty stall, it just made sense. I walked back into the library covered in snow. Rowdy greeted me with relieved panting and head-butts against my leg, seeking pats. He was a good dog.
The clouds were threatening more snow, but I wasn’t certain any would fall. It felt too cold to get any more snow. Either way, I didn’t want to run the risk of being caught in a storm. It was one thing to venture into the snow when there were other people, police, and snowplows about, but it was another thing to do it when there would be no one to save my stupid ass if I screwed up.
I spent the day in a chair near the fire, reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book, The Long Winter, by the daylight from the windows. This is one of my all-time favorite books. My mom gave me the whole Little House series for Christmas when I was in second grade. They had been her favorite books when she was a little girl, and she thought she would enjoy reading them to me, hoping against hope that her little all-boy play-in-the-sandbox-with-trucks son might like them as she had. And I did. I loved them. I don’t know if it was because of the idea of someone who actually lived like she did making that somewhat fictional memoir or the connection to Wisconsin Laura had, or whether it was because my mom read them to me every night for months, with me curled up at her side listening to her lilting voice. When I read the books now--and I do revisit them frequently--I can still hear her.
The Long Winter is my favorite of the book series. I like it partially because it was one of Laura’s most factually accurate books, detailing the Snow Winter of 1880-1881, which her family lived through while they nestled in DeSmet, South Dakota, and I like it partially because it’s so cozy. From the first snowfall, it’s the Ingalls family huddled together around a cook stove to stay warm, wrapped in blankets and shawls, dealing with long blizzards that assaulted the plains. Pa would risk life and limb to haul in slough hay to burn for his family’s survival after the trains stopped and coal could not get through until spring. Ma was eking out survival on the prairie by milling seed wheat through a coffee mill to make rough brown bread to feed her family. The near-starvation, the struggle, and then the eventual heroics by Almanzo Wilder and Cap Garland to run through deadly, dangerous negative temperatures on a gamble that a rumor of a settler having a crop of wheat that might save the town. I’d read the book so many times that my own copy, back at my family’s home, was dog-eared with a cracked spine. There were a few loose pages in the cheap paperback. The library’s copy was a good hardcover version, and it was heavy in my hands. The pages were musty with age, heavy with that fragrant library book smell that I relished. They were so worn that they had a strangely soft texture, more like skin than paper. I read the whole book in one sitting that afternoon.
For dinner, I gave Rowdy a can of dog food and made myself some Ramen with canned chicken. It was warm in my stomach and made me feel good inside. At that moment, I felt like I could make it through the winter. I would be like the Ingalls family, huddling in my little home, struggling through to Spring on the supplies I hoarded before snow flew. It would be a fleeting feeling, but at least it was feeling, you know? I was so numb to life to a large degree that any sort of hope was welcomed.
Snow fell again that night, more of the tiny ice pellets that stung the skin. Rowdy went out and did his business quickly again, and we slept. I did not worry about the water this night. The thermometer was staying around 40 degrees, so I had to trust that whatever heat escaping the annex through the doors would keep it so. If it got colder, maybe I’d have to move the pile of bottles, but I would worry about that then.
The next day, the weather warmed considerably. The sun came out and shone with a vengeance that nearly blinded me as it reflected from the pristine, unmarred white. Some of the snow started to melt on the roof. It trickled in rivulets and drops into the collection barrels. I could go outside without feeling the horrible bite of wind chill. In some places, the black asphalt of the road melted the snow that had fallen on it.
The day after that, the clouds returned. These were low clouds with dense, battleship gray bellies, coming from almost a southeasterly direction, and I had been in Wisconsin long enough to know those sorts of clouds meant snow. As the temperature climbed to thirty degrees, snow began to fall in heavy, wet flakes. This was the Currier & Ives snow. It coated everything it touched, clinging to tree boughs and windowsills. This, in many ways, is a worse snow than the razor-ice snow. The snow weighed a lot. Tree boughs were more likely to sag and snap during this snow. If there had been traffic, this would be the sort of snowfall where accidents would be more likely. I stayed at my window post again, watching the snow and reading books.
That was how my winter began. For the first couple of weeks, I would make scavenging runs in the snowmobile when I could, rooting through houses or stores that I had not hit yet, trying to find water bottles that hadn’t frozen and cracked, but for the most part, I was trapped in the library. I quickly began to realize that cabin fever was a very real thing, especially when there was no TV to watch and no one to return questions I asked aloud for no particular reason.
I decided that I needed
to get out of the library, so I resolved to test my mettle as a mighty hunter. I took the deer rifle, a small box of ammo, and the Arctic Cat with game trailer, and I headed out into the open prairies south of town. Rowdy was anxious as I left, but I needed him to stay at the library and wait. I made sure the fire would last until I returned, and I put the metal grate in front of it to keep sparks from jumping out and burning the place down.
I didn’t drive too far from town, actually. Just past the library was a small rise near the dog park that looked down onto a cornfield not much bigger than a baseball field. Many times I’d driven past that point in the winter and seen deer grazing in that field on the corn that had fallen during harvest. I figured that would be as good a place as any to sit and wait.
I was dressed in my parka, Arctic explorer pants, and boots. I had thick mittens and a knit cap, and I even brought a full-face neoprene mask in one of my pockets. I could have ascended Everest in my gear. The weather was not bitterly cold, but it was cold enough. If I was going to be out there for some time, I knew I’d better pack accordingly.
Once the engine of the Cat silenced, I was plunged into a world of quietude the likes of which I hadn’t reckoned. The library was silent, yes. However, the world, despite the occasional ambient noise, was even more silent. The snow seemed to muffle every sound. The snow had moistened the dry leaves of the stalks of corn so that their usual papery rustle was barely more than a bit of low static in the distance. The winter birds were quiet in the gray daylight. Even the crows, which had somehow become even more prevalent since the apocalypse (as you could imagine), were content to sit on branches, hunkered against the cold, and watch me with unblinking black eyes.
The Survivor Journals Omnibus [Books 1-3] Page 9