Talk about a day in the country
By PAT WICK
© Another Day in the Country
Talk about a day in the country — the days, these days, seem like each 24 hours is at least a week. Reason being, as most of you know, Ramona has been without power (just like a lot of you have been without electricity) since last week Tuesday.
On Monday, Tooltime Tim was off work because of RAIN and we took a run to Salina for supplies. On that trip, his brother-in-law called and said, "Buy me a gas stove for backup, we're going to have a bad storm."
"Really?" I said. "When?"
"Supposed to hit tonight," said TTT. "ICE!"
I am so naïve. Having managed to be GONE (we were in Hawaii one year, Key West the next) when the last few ice capades happened in Kansas, I had no idea the dread that should clutch my heart at the mention of ICE!
Well, A.J. didn't even have time to get the stove completely hooked up before the storm hit. Like a thief in the night it came, coating the trees and fences with icicles. Beautiful to behold, but deadly! At five in the morning, electric lines started succumbing to the pressure and we lost electricity in Ramona. "It won't be off long," I thought — even said it out loud later in the morning after it had been off for four hours. "Surely, any time now it will be coming back on."
Triple T suggested we drive around and check out the town. "Limb damage," he said as we headed toward the truck. Limb damage? The whole town looked like a war zone. There were trees and lines down everywhere. Everyone had branches, covered in crystalline ice, in their yards. Poles were snapped in half, tangled lines across the roads so that we virtually were imprisoned in nature's ice house.
Like all good neighbors who have surveyed the ravages of nature, we could tell this was going to last awhile so we began the systematic "checking in" with everyone in town to see if they had the necessities — heat, food, water, flashlights.
Without electricity — at least in this new house — we were like a hog on ice, so to speak, helpless. Couldn't see. Couldn't hear the news. Eventually, couldn't feel our toes because it was so cold.
"Do you have a plan?" someone called the post office to inquire. "We're creating it as we go, since we don't know how long this is going to last!"
"A good long while," said Dan, our county commissioner, when he called to check in with us. "I'm sending over a generator for someone" — we gave it to Ralph who was trying to heat his newer house with the gas cook stove.
The older houses were the best houses to have — especially those that still had floor furnaces. We promptly moved over to Cousin's Corner and Tim convinced the furnace to just keep running.
When we went over to Clark's for supplies they took one look at us and said, "We're sorry but we don't have anything you need for this disaster — completely sold out!" That meant no batteries, no lamp oil, no flashlights, no generators, that's for sure.
After a week of this, with the local prognosticators telling us that we'd be lucky to have electricity by Christmas Day, and "lo, we went to Salina to see the generators there." In fact, we brought FOUR generators for different folks. For this Christmas season, Ramona is not lighting up the prairie and no longer experiencing a Silent Night as about 30 generators churn out their own rhythm.
To amuse ourselves, we began composing our very own Christmas carols — starting with "It Came Right After Midnight Here," with six verses including one about Tony who wanted a generator, not for heat so much as news on TV. We've got a second song on the back burner to the tune of "Star of the East," only we're calling it "West Star!" That's the star shining brightest in our hemisphere. They came with trucks, not camels, following the splintered telephone poles and broken lines.
Last night, after eight days of darkness in Ramona, someone flipped the switch and we had light. Thank you, Westar, you've come through again, on another day in the country.
