While out to lunch with my buddy last week, the conversation turned to the holidays, and I told him I was very happy to see that a green Christmas was in the forecast this time, especially after what happened last year.
“Why?” he replied, a look of puzzlement across his face. “What happened last year?”
I thought maybe he was making a joke. The blizzard, I reminded him. The worst weather event I’ve ever experienced in my life. A blizzard so bad that, after the fourth day without power or heat, our food dwindling, our fingers numb from the cold, I was genuinely starting to worry about the safety of my wife and our baby. That blizzard; ring any bells?
“Oh yeah,” he said with that tone people use when they only sorta half recall something. “Yeah, yeah, I remember that, I think we got a little bit of snow at my house.”
The Christmas Blizzard of 2022 was one of the worst experiences of my entire life. And while I often think of it as a shared experience that Niagarans went through together, lunch with my buddy last week reminded me that it was a much more localised event than my memory has led me to believe.
For my family, it was a traumatic holiday marked by isolation, fear, and near-frostbite. For friends of ours who live barely 15 minutes up the QEW, it was a regular old Christmas.
And I hate them for it. Not really. Maybe a little bit.
I just think it’s not fair. Why did I have to go through this madness when others – people who live in the same town as me, literally people just living on the other side of Fort Erie – never even lost power and had a more or less normal Christmas? It doesn’t seem right.
My house has no fireplace. And our stove is electric. And we don’t have a generator.
So by the fourth day without power, temperatures inside our house were hovering just above zero. I remember someone asking me once, why didn’t you just leave? My in-laws, who live only a couple minutes away (and five minutes farther from the lake, crucially) had power, and heat; so why didn’t I just go there?
Maybe because of the six feet of snow blocking our driveway, the four feet of snow on the road, and the seven abandoned cars strewn about our street from other people who did attempt to leave, only to get stuck and have to leave their car and make the walk of shame back to their house.
By Day Two it had become fairly obvious that we were not going anywhere and were at the mercy of the snowplows, which were still another three days away from being able to make it to us, thanks to all the abandoned cars which needed to be towed away first.
We had also pretty much run out of decent food. Stuff in the fridge had started to go bad, so we put some of it outside to keep it from spoiling, but it all got buried by a second round of snow and then turned to blocks of ice.
I managed to shovel a narrow path out to the barbecue in our backyard, and after building a makeshift wind barricade from duct tape and cardboard, managed to get it lit. All we had left was some bacon and cans of soup, neither of which are easily cooked on a barbecue, but with few options, I made it work and we spent the next couple days eating over-cooked bacon and under-cooked soup.
By Day Three there was no heat left in our house. The thermostat read five degrees, and with an 18-month-old baby who didn’t really understand what was happening and didn’t want to wear a coat and mittens and toque all day, I had to get the shovel again and start digging our way into the car.
Once our trusty Kia was liberated from its snowy tomb, we were able to blast the heater and warm up a bit and charge up our cell phones. There was enough gas in the tank to do that a few more times, at which point we were really going to have to figure out what to do next. Fortunately, power came back on before we needed to face those tough decisions.
We got through it, but the Blizzard of ‘22 was something I never want to experience ever again. Which is why my wife told me I need to get one of those generators and hook it up so we can at least hunker down through the next blizzard with some heat.
Which I still haven’t done. The good news is, this holiday week is looking very much blizzard free. Thank you, global warming.
James Culic really needs to get that generator before his wife kills him, but knows who not to call to install it. Find out how to yell at him at the bottom of the page, or send a pithy letter to the editor.
