Guest column: Getting by in dark days

The early reports of first rain, then snow, seemed somewhat unusual. But those of us who have lived up north a long time know winter has the upper hand. Just live with it, because before you know it, things will change.

I saw the rain come - and come - and came to the conclusion that at least we wouldn't get 4 feet of snow when it was all said and done. The Halloween storm of 1991 was like that. Two bursts of snow came in at about 12 to 14 inches. It was super heavy and clung to the trees like thick white snot.

Reports from friends by Esko told of snow at least 20 inches deep. I suspected Lake Superior, far from being frozen and with an east wind, was dumping snow to the east of us.

The young trees didn't have a chance. The heavy coating, at times 4 to 6 inches, bent the trees so far over many of the roads that only a rabbit could run through. The county snow plow took two days to come on the township roads. We who live here made sure downed trees were off the roads, readying for the plow.

The electricity went off about 3 a.m. Thursday. I put out candles so everyone in the house would not stumble into anything. There is slab heat, so I thought we could weather the storm. We had generators but the well along Reed Lane couldn't be run off a generator. No usual water source was available.

My lifelong friends Rod and Adele Niskanen sold their home in the Prairie Lake area and are now living with me this winter before heading out to drive around the U.S. We decided to go to Moose Lake and get supplies and potable water in case the power outage went longer than usual.

Just flushing the toilets and doing dishes after cooking required water, so we filled containers at the Moose Lake fire department. We were thankful. "Small-town America," we commented.

We thought we would eat a meal in Moose Lake but all the dine-in places were closed. Fast food wouldn't do it for us. We bought food and supplies between Dollar General and KJ's. Heading back home with a four-wheel-drive pickup, we settled in to cook our own meals.

My grandson Carl and his friends chopped a hole in the Dead Moose River and hauled water for flushing. They broke out the light plants and moved gas around to use at each house. The automatic garage door openers didn't work so well in this situation.

Landlines and fiber optics failed. Cell phones faded in and out, as most of the cell towers were without power. I realized that there was so much matted snow on the trees that communication signals were hampered and were only hit-or-miss.

This situation reminded me of days gone by, before cell phones, when I would stay in a tarpaper shack at a logging site for days, with a kerosene lamp and cooking meals and drying wet clothes using an air-tight stove. An air-tight stove was no thicker than the metal in a Campbell's soup can. It cost about $40, but kept the shack warm. Those days a logger worked hard and slept soundly: no need for entertainment. Mice at times would run along the top plate of the wall and keep me company.

This was a time for visiting, and humor got us through this. One of our neighbors saw an outage map on their cell phone and said that the bulk of the electric repair people looked like they were working around the lakes such as Big Sandy. Money makes a difference again, they commented.

This event was just another reality check on how we as humans can plan and plan and still have little control in these types of situations. Going on the fourth day of darkness started to make us think this felt like it would go on forever. It's the longest outage I could remember. I was just glad it wasn't during the dairy farm period of my youth when we would have to hand milk our cows during outages.

I asked my friend Adele what she thought of it all. She said her daughter Jody had made an appropriate comment after keeping her head face down for days after eye surgery. Toward the tail end of the ordeal, she lamented, "I am so over this."

Dan Reed is a freelance writer and local historian who lives in Automba Township, where both sides of his family settled 130 years ago. He's seen a lot and heard lots of stories.