Ice Queen

I channeled MacGyver this past week – remember the TV character who was the global icon for resourcefulness and invention in the face of adversity? That was me.

On Friday, I left my house at 6AM to drive to Oxford, MS to arrive at noon to pick up Tin from Stonewater. He was ten days past his 90-day stint in their program after having left In Balance Ranch in Arizona mid September and traveled to North Georgia to participate in a wilderness program at Blue Ridge where he would be primitive camping, seemed like a good plan in the spur of the emergency moment, but like most “plans” with Tin, it wasn’t – you can’t plan for a being as dynamic as he is, so I picked him up on what was supposed to be a family visit mid October, and we spent one day driving through Tennessee mountains until we were allowed to enter Stonewater in Oxford at 11PM.

Plan A – if you could call any of this a plan – was Stonewater was starting a new program for teens like Tin who had been sober, been through the program, and were ready to mentor other boys who were struggling and just entering the primary program. Which, by the way, Tin is an ace at, because he loves nothing more than to help someone else.

Only there was a glitch, permits were delayed, bureaucracy, not Stonewater’s, but external local offices, and so Tin was in a holding pattern and it was suggested that a new program should be found, like now. The Carpenter Shed was put on the table. Reluctantly, I called them, and then excitedly, I engaged them – a six-month program that takes older teens like Tin and helps them navigate into the next steps on becoming an adult – helping them obtain driver’s license, academic degree, part-time job, checking account – teaching them how to launch into adulthood with the help of a life coach and a therapist who work together to help the individual teen pick out his own plan and acquire the tools to execute it.

My plan had been even more simple – pick Tin up from Stonewater, get to Monroe, LA where TCS is, stay in an Air BnB, and take him to the school on Monday. I would have some time with him for meals and talks. It was Friday, remember, the day before Icemaggedon was going to hit the area – and despite all the warnings – I stocked up on groceries at WalMart on an empty stomach, which means I really stocked up, and drove straight into the beast to get him. And we drove to Monroe, stopping first to make sure the car had a full tank of gas, just in case. I had brought a lantern,just in case. I had accidentally put two scented candles with my things by (lucky) accident.

Friday night, the temperatures began to drop, the rain fell, and insta presto ice formed, and Saturday by 2PM, the electricity was out across the region, water was dripping at a bare minimum stream, and the house went from pleasantly toasty to unbearably frigid with condensation showing our breath. Large tree branches were falling all around us – one fell inches behind our car – on each side of the house we heard sonic booms and saw a branch take down the electrical pole across the street with all its wires mangled into the icy branches, then another electrical wire had crossed the opposite corner blocking the path for vehicles. The ice was too much for these Southern trees unused to bearing the weight.

So it began, four pots of water filled to the brim and put to boil on the gas stove that luckily was still working. Once they were boiling, I heated frying pans on top and would place them where we were sitting. Both of my battery chargers for the phone were safely on my desk at home in Bay Saint Louis, and the only charger became the car, which sat under several tall trees, one with a branch, broken, and hanging onto another branch. Widow makers. The same tree had dropped the long thick gnarly branch directly behind our car blocking us from getting out of the driveway. Two cars were stuck in ice across the street. So our safety in the car, despite it’s delicious warmth and charging abilities, was precarious. To get in the car with its doors frozen shut, I warmed a dry blanket on one of the frying pans on one of the boiling water pots and when it was warm enough, I went and draped it across the driver’s door, and then laid my body back on the towel for body heat and with our gentle warmth, the door opened without breaking anything on the car.

There was no internet, so we could not tell the weather or what was happening around us. Updates were delivered by Ed, who would find places we could walk to if it got really bad – 2.5 miles there was a Waffle House open, 1.5 miles there was a Catholic Church possibly open. We had shut off all the rooms that were not necessary to get the kitchen warm and spread any of its heat to the dining and living room. Everything else in the house was ice cold. Condensation obscured the windows and two framed artworks slipped from the wall onto the floor even though the nails were still there.

At night, I warmed our beds with frying pans and we got under blankets and mattress protectors we found in a closet, fully dressed in our winter clothes times three, and were able to sleep on night one. Day two, the refrigerator started warming on the inside and so I took bags of lettuce and cheese into my room which was colder and put the freezer items outside on the icy back steps. Two trees had fallen in the back yard. I had washed three loads of laundry on Friday night that Tin brought with him from Stonewater and together with what I brought from home made piles on the sunroom (ha!) couch – tee shirts, long sleeved shirts, pants, shorts, hoodies, socks, underwear. All clean for possibly the first time since the last time I was able to get a hold of his clothes – and over the course of the three frigid and boring days, Tin pulled articles of clothing from its stack and tried it on and left it in a crumpled heap on the dark floor of his frigid bedroom.

Breathe in icy air, breathe out ice air. My new mantra.

I had moved from my bedroom to the sofa in the living room with three blankets, and I used four warming pots to get it warm under the covers and then drank copious amounts of hot tea and hot chocolate. We had food – which I cooked day in and day out on the stove with only a trickle of water to clean the dishes afterwards. We had our two candles – one in the bathroom, which was pitch black because the walls were painted black and the window panes were covered with mirrors. We had our lantern that had to be charged in the death car. So we used it sparingly. The other candle sat on the coffee table in the living room. Tin found 6 LED tea lights in a drawer and he put them in his bedroom. There had been a candelabra on the breakfront with tapered candles that we moved to the coffee table to light for night time.

All day and night, branches were falling out of the tree tops or entire trees came down in the backyard, side yard, front yard, and across the street, and down the street. The branches landed and sounded like sonic BOOMS. Infrequently, a large truck would drive by slowly. Once, we saw an Entergy truck but we had already gotten word from Ed who had sent what the Monroe Mayor had written that was it was too dangerous for the Entergy lineman to work and so they were holding off. Oxford – we heard – was in worse shape, though I don’t know who was judging Icemaggedon.

On day three, I asked the owner of the Air BnB – who told me her son had a four wheel drive – if she could get the branch behind our car moved or cut up or just out of the way. I just thought when the time came to leave, we couldn’t get out. And then someone knocked on the door – Tin’s soon-to-be life coach had come to check on us. He walked in and I was on the couch with four pots on me on top of three blankets and he said, “We could get you to Ruston, to an Air BnB with heat.”

I told him we’d think about it.

A friend of mine in California is a life coach. She once told me that everybody is born naturally resourceful, creative and whole. I had summoned all three to get through Icemageddon, and I felt I had finally cracked the nut – charge the lantern and phone while the car is running but we are not sitting in it, heat up the kitchen so that the warmth spreads to two more rooms, use the dripping faucet to refill the pots, freezer items outside, cold items in my now unused bedroom, found an espresso pot and was able to make coffee on the stove, heat flat pans on top of the boiling pots to warm places we were sitting, give Tin my phone for him to listen to music and dance for two hours at a time creating his own body warmth, and I would read. I was reading two books – Larry Brown’s memoir, On Fire and Neko Case’s memoir, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You. Tin and I had several off-scene conversations – those moments when he couldn’t get my phone and we were standing in the warmish kitchen and there was nothing left but connection. It was sorta nice.

We had talked about his treatment. Stonewater had been good the first time, the ranch was a “vacation” he said, the woods (as he called wilderness) was not good because the kids were really too much to handle, and Stonewater again was good with the staff but the kids were too far behind in what he had already learned in 16 months and he felt they were not compassionate. We talked about the future. Tin said he wants me to support him in his music and clothing business. We talked about our dogs. We talked about his friends, about what I knew was new with the ones I stayed in touch with. We developed a rhythm – connect and talk, separate and I would read and he would listen to music, come together to eat. We were whole.

When Stephen, his life coach, offered something different, my first instinct was to say no. Our stuff was all over the place, we knew what to do now, I didn’t want to leave my car behind. But as soon as Stephen walked out the door, Tin turned and said, “I want to be in a warm house.”

And I realized that I had jumped the MacGyver shark – yes, I could do it, but why?

We went into action packing all the things and cleaning what we could. Took the trash out. Then we got in the car and drove through the scary landscape of power lines down, snow and ice everywhere, and blocked roads. We got to the offices in downtown Monroe, parked, and carried our stuff to Stephen’s big truck where I took a spill on an ice patch that nearly had me doing a split – which is impossible. We drove backroads, and iced roads, and avoided the interstate that was piled up with stalled cars and snow and ice mounds, and got to a juncture, where Parker, the experiential director, pulled up in his mega truck and picked us up. We were going to Ruston, where Parker lives, courtesy of the CEO of the new school, to a house that had electricity and running water.

We pulled up the steep driveway that was covered with a sheet of ice, and went inside a brand new four bedroom house, in a brand new subdivision, with working internet, heat, and lights, and after I unpacked, I took a hot shower – my first bathing opportunity in three days. I didn’t want to get out but had to make dinner. It wasn’t until day six that we are able to walk outside, before it had been because of widow makers and now it was because of an ice slide to get to the snow deep street. We were finally able to walk through the grooves monster truck tires had created and it felt like freedom.

By day seven, I was stir crazy, the communication that had begun under duress had fractured with the presence of mod cons, and now Tin stayed in his room with the TV turned to YouTube underground rap going nonstop, I had a headache, and I stayed in the living room drinking cup after cup of hot tea or hot chocolate, and reading, writing, and watching TV myself. I finished Pernille, which I loved, then watched Free Bert, then watched Train Dreams that left me so melancholy about life’s passage that it made me go inside myself even more.

When I drove home Thursday, I felt like I had run through so many different emotions that it would take days, weeks, months to sort through all of what I had been feeling as well as not feeling. From my robotic can do-attitude about facing adverse conditions – something I must say I’ve become pro at, to my sense of isolation in a warm suburban house (one of my greatest fears), to the constant puzzle of how to parent Tin. I was returning home, but somehow even home didn’t sit right with me. I felt like there were still parts of me that had not thawed and perhaps never would.