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I'm Fine With Fall

© Sandy McCollum

It's been snowing the last few days in Ketchikan. I wasn't happy, though not nearly upset as I was when our first snow came in mid-October this year. That's just too early! The locals are telling me it's going to be a hard one this year, like the ones we used to have. We've had it easy with only two frozen months and intermittent snow that can last until May. Huh?

I've only lived here a little over seven years, and I've seen some surprisingly mild winters. But, I've lived what I thought was the harshest winter of them all, here, too. 1997 was helacious, the winter seemed to be angry the instant it arrived. Bitter cold, way below zero temperatures and all kinds of work came to a standstill. There was no money and too many people needing.

We had nine people living in our apartment at the time. My daughter and her baby and husband had no where to go, and I certainly would rather be crowded than have them out on their own. My husband was the only one working, so it wasn't easy. I think we ate canned salmon in all of the 1001 ways the cookbook suggested.

Our pipes froze solid, so we had to keep warming them with the hair-dryer. The hardware store was clean out of heat-tape, and after doing this so many times a day for so many days, we called the landlord. He informed us that all we had to do was plug in our heat-tape, and if the upstairs neighbors say anything, tell them their heat-tape is on back-order. Hmm. We asked him if he was sure he didn't have that backwards, and he said he was sure because nobody lived in the upstairs unit the winter before. Hmmm.

It seems our neighbors decided to ‘borrow' our heat-tape! Well, it was pretty cold... So my husband figured out which pipes went where and divided the heat-tape between the two of our homes, and we each had partial flow.

The washing machine wasn't on the pipes with heat-tape, so we had to thaw it out for every single load. We didn't even use the hair-dryer in the house anymore, and we learned to use our clean things sparingly. Eventually we figured out that if we hung our wet laundry on the balcony and waited until it froze solid, then gave it some good whacks with a stick to get the ice off, the dryer didn't take as long and we could do load after consecutive load without having to hair-dry the pipes.