It was a dark and stormy night…

Haha OK not here in Oakland, it is pretty much always nice here (except for fucking monsoon season in the winter!!). It was a dark and stormy night back home, in Brush-ton! This is a bit of a break from weird new adventures, this is about an old adventure!@

The night I speak of pretty much continued for a week; even the daytime was dim and grey, but that part is normal for winter in the NORTH COUNTRY! It was in early January of 1998, right before the end of Christmas break, when the ice storm started.

At first it was pretty great! We had our first day of school cancelled due to the ice, and so us crazy country boys (with crazy parents who were nutso for letting their teenagers drive in horrid inch thick ice on the roads), we went to this hill in town and played a good game called BATTLESLEDS on the ice. There was a very steep and tall hill in town (town was several blocks of houses and a past office and IGA and hardware store and street of failed businesses and a bar, of course). This steep and icy hill had a tree growing in the middle of it, and less than forty feet from the end of the hill a gentle slope dumped into a small foot-high creek..

These features of our sled warfare battlezone features had about half a foot of snow on them, and an inch of ice when we set off on the sleds. We spent all afternoon walking up the awesome hill and sliding down!

The ground cover was made of a special kind of snow often found on the North Country of Northern New York, it was the kind of snow that FUCKING CUTS YOU!@ It sucks to be out in it, unless you are fucked up! Then you can pretend like you are a giant smashing into glaciers as you walk! SMASH SMASH OW TAKE THAT GLAICER as you walk into the freezing cold in a T-shirt because you do not want to admit to anyone that it is actually fucking cold outside. Weee.

ANYWAY so we brought our plastic sleds to the top of the hill, these were circle sleds and toboggans and whatnot, and we slid them all down the hill at the same time and slammed into each other and tried to push or pull each other off of the sleds while screaming down the cutting ice-snow at insane speeds! OH SHIT THE TREE, ahaha we only hit the pine tree a couple of times actually, and in the end when like three people in a row spilled a bit into the river we went home.

What did we do the next two days, when school was cancelled again? JUST READ THE ABOVE PARAGRAPH except add “went to hardware store to buy new sleds/rummaged in garage for old sleds” at the beginning, since by the end of each day half of our sleds were shredded from abuse. I only got a few cuts, I think (and lots of bruises)

By the end of the last day it was really bad on the roads, and they announced that school was cancelled for the rest of the week. Yay, another week of vacation!! I almost died on the way home that day, my car was an old rear-wheel drive Buick (78 Electra) and the clunky v8-weighted front just swung out from under me at twenty, then again later at ten, miles per hour, and the car spun until I managed to stop it. Thankfully no one was on the roads, probably because they weren’t being dangerously stupid like me!! You see, I don’t think I mentioned this, but the drizzle, fine and light and misty, never stopped coming down, from Sunday to Wednesday…and it kept coming down after that, too. The trees, roads, and power lines glistened in the dim light from the inch of ice already accumulated over every exposed inch.

That Wednesday night I parked, or more accurately, slid my car in my usual spot next to a birch tree by my room. The tree was already starting to bend towards the ground quite dramatically. but that is for later….I mean, at this point, we still had electricity…see ya kids!
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