Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 16, 1993 TAG: 9303160226
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOE KENNEDY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CATAWBA LENGTH: Long
WHEN LIFE IN THE COUNTRY ISN'T SO FUN
Before we bought the new oil burner about five years ago, winter weather was a perennial problem for us. The old system's fuel tanks were outside. The polar winds from the northwest turned the fuel oil to sludge in the filter, causing the burner to go out.The exact number of frigid nights we spent waiting for service - and thinking ourselves the most put-upon people on Earth - eludes me. But we were deeply familiar with the feeling of helplessness.
Since the new burner was installed, the problems have been sporadic and mild. We were surprised, then, on Friday night, when we noticed, at 11 o'clock, that the house seemed cool. A trip to the basement yielded some distressing familiar news: The oil burner wasn't working.
A push of the reset button lit it up for about 90 seconds, and then, nothing. The snow by then was eight inches deep and falling hard. A call to our regular service man informed us that he had no one to bring him out (he doesn't drive anymore).
A call to our oil supplier revealed, as we thought, that when it came to service, we were on our own. Calls to several big oil distributors in Roanoke brought friendly, though fruitless, conversations with dispatchers and repairmen, and an invitation to call back in the morning, when, presumably, their regular customers would have been served.
Finally we reached a Roanoke heating and air-conditioning outfit whose advertisements I'd seen in the newspaper. The man on call said he'd try to raise a friend with a four-wheel drive vehicle and come out. At 2:30, they arrived. By 3:15 they had fixed the control and started back down the hill to the road. The snow was a good nine inches deep by then and falling in thick, rippling curtains.
Saturday snow and winds created a fair imitation of an Arctic white-out. Like everyone else, we worried about the power lines. By 9 p.m., the snow's depth had reached some 20 inches, with deeper drifts. Just after we started watching "Cousin Cousine" on the VCR, the power quit. We laid out sleeping bags, blankets and comforters and brought the children down to the living room. Craig-Botetourt, the electric company, took our message and said it would be a while before things got fixed.
We slept fitfully, wondering what the morning would bring.
Early Sunday, Michael, 9, looked out the window and said, "Oh, no! More snow!" That was a first.
The power company told us they were on their way, but had run into deep drifts and stuck cars blocking Newport Road. The power stayed off.
We walked around the house shivering, until about noon. By then, Sharon had packed roughly as many things as we take for a week's vacation at the beach, using black plastic trash bags, ropes and a sled. We started toward the barn to feed the horse and the cows, and then to Bobby and Brenda Custer's house, about a quarter-mile away. The animals were glad to see us.
The bitter wind and three- and four-foot drifts (almost as tall as Katherine, who is 5) on the road slowed us up. The short journey took an hour.
Bobby and Brenda heat entirely with wood, and they have a tractor-driven generator. Their house was toasty. They had basketball on the tube. Brenda's lunch - of homemade vegetable soup, pork chops, potato salad, biscuits and strawberry preserves - was the Meal of the Year.
Not long after we arrived, someone looked out the window and saw our side spotlight shining. The power had been restored. By then, a series of telephone calls had told us that a woman, down the road without heat or power, had called for evacuation for herself and her children. A road grader led a rescue vehicle in, but turned back when it encountered drifts up to the grader's glass. It wasn't long, though, before the power returned, so the family probably was all right.
We left Bobby and Brenda's about 3:30 and reached home to discover the upstairs baseboard heat pipes cracked and oozing ice. Calls to mechanically minded friends and our own years of struggling with that cursed system enabled us to isolate the upstairs rooms. Downstairs, the temperature had climbed into the 60s. We went to bed in the living room praying that Niagara Falls wouldn't drop onto us sometime during the night.
Monday morning, the highway department's dream of reaching us remained unfulfilled. The drifts were still waist-high, but the wind was down. The only evidence of traffic, Lee Sirry's futile attempt on his tractor Sunday to get out for his father-in-law's medication, had ended in tread marks beside our barn. We were stuck.
Our new-found heating experts promised to come out as soon as they could fit us in, once the road was cleared. We took some indoor emergency measures, banning Nintendo and living-room basketball to prevent lethargy that might require medical attention.
Then Brenda called to tell us the grader was heading our way. We looked out and saw it, an orange John Deere, No. 670, followed by a highway department gravel truck. They ran into trouble on the upgrade past Bobby and Brenda's. I don't know how far they got.
We called the heating people and hoped the pipes would hold till they arrived. It had been a trying time, but we did not think ourselves as unusual in our inconvenience. We had heat and food. The animals survived, even the calf born Thursday.
And our kids were safe. That's the important thing.