The Ice Storm... ten years later

This week marks the ten-year anniversary of the 1996 blizzard/ice storm that paralyzed much of the East Coast. Can't believe it's been that long. In this area it was really two storms: one that covered the place in ice and snow and then a second one hit a few days later with much more ice. There wasn't nearly as much precipitation as there'd been in the Storm of the Century three years earlier (I doubt anything I'll ever live to see will be comparable to that) but it still ended up being a major nuisance for everyone affected by it.

The thing I remember most about the storm was that it forced me to move into my first apartment much sooner than I'd expected. I was taking a winter-term history class at Elon and my new roomie was off in London for the entire month: nobody was in the apartment and the last roommate had owned most of the furniture, so the place was really bare. Well, during the first storm I wound up staying one night in my old dorm room, made the very careful drive back home the next afternoon and heard that a second storm was on its way. I figured the logical thing to do was to hole up in the apartment a lot sooner than anticipated, so I'd be close to campus if we had class the next day. So I packed up a sleeping bag, a lamp, some books, and the TV/VCR combo I'd gotten for Christmas - and a few other essentials - into the car and headed for my new digs. I got the car unpacked and headed out to find food and some entertainment to hold me over in case I got iced-in with nowhere to go. I wound up getting a Battletech novel and a Doctor Who videotape ("The Five Doctors" episode) from the Burlington mall and then one of those 2-pizza deals from Little Caesar's (and some breadsticks 'course), and some two-liter Cokes. The accomodations that night - my first ever in my own apartment - were Spartan to say the least: without my own bed for the time being I had to sleep on the couch. But as I ate my pizza and watched the video, with the ice that ended up trapping me indoors for the next two days falling outside... I felt so much triumphant pleasure. Like a king over my own domain. It didn't matter that I barely had anything at all in the apartment: that it was my very own place to live in for the first time in my life was all that mattered to me. And I was loving it! It was so much fun in fact that a few years later when I moved into my next apartment, I just had to replicate the ritual of eating pizza while watching that same Doctor Who tape on my first night in the place.

Lotta good memories that were had in that apartment, along with a few crazy ones and some that... well, no one would ever believe me if I wrote about it here. But they all started with the ice storm ten years ago this week. And I just felt led to share my own memories about it, to add to those of anyone else who probably remembers the storm also.