William Marvel: Weathering New Hampshire

The storm that buried us the week before Christmas was not the worst snowfall on Davis Hill in my lifetime, but it was worse than any I can recall seeing. As is often the case, we seem to have been hammered a lot harder here than other places nearby. Parts of North Conway saw only 10 inches or a foot, but on Saturday morning it was two feet deep behind my back shed, and two or three more inches fell over the next few hours. It was all what is commonly called "heart attack" snow, so wet and heavy that it demanded a small shovel and a lot of patience. Even with someone else plowing now, we worked seven hours at cleaning up on Saturday, three more hours on Sunday, and two on Monday.

We had to alternate the roof-raking and snow-shoveling with finding ways to cook and heat water, and feeding a little fire in the furnace, just big enough to keep the house from freezing but not hot enough to overheat the ducting. Losing power in a big storm is all but guaranteed, and it will remain that way as long as our power companies keep distributing electricity via the same vulnerable system of wooden poles they've been using since the 1890s —in the middle of a forest, on roads traveled by disproportionate numbers of idiots. Even in the summer, it's surprising how often some nitwit takes out a pole and throws whole neighborhoods back on 19th century technologies.