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108 East Madison Avenue Berryville, Arkansas 72616 |
Ozarts and the Grand View |
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Grand View Hotel Ozarts News, Columns, and Writing Pictures |
Trapped In the Ice By Alexander Virden While we were working at our restaurant, in the Grand View Hotel, on Monday, the radio told everyone to get somewhere by six p.m. to avoid the ice, so I got on the horn and talked with the Lion’s Club and the president agreed that it would be best to cancel their dinner. It was right around six when Sandra and I got the restaurant cleaned up. The freezing rain had already started and we headed out of town in a line of cars traveling 25 to 40 miles per hour. The roads were already covered with ice and the defroster and wipers, on our little Tracker, couldn’t keep up with the ice forming on the windshield and we had to pull over twice and scrape the ice. We brought enough food for two days, expecting to only miss one day, we thought that was prudent, since we have a Tracker 4x4 that handles bad road conditions really well and didn’t foresee any reason why we wouldn’t get out, especially since it was supposed to get warm and melt after two days. Running a restaurant has gotten us out of the habit of keeping food at home and it actually seemed like we were bringing a lot of food. I’ve lived in our cabin for several years and have never gotten stuck. Even when trees have fallen in the past, I would lock my hubs and drive up into the woods around the tree, fetch my chainsaw and cut up the tree. That night we watched TV, listened to the rain, and went to sleep. The next morning we woke up to a winter wonderland. The world was brilliant white and crystalized with ice. Since the power was still on we thought everything was fine. Normally if the power stayed on past the storm it stayed on. Our water depends on a spring pump and I was so confident of this that I didn’t even fill backup jugs of water, past the couple of gallons we normally keep. I checked the phone and it was still on. We’d already decided not to try to go to the Grand View and open the restaurant, so I didn’t hurry to take a shower, or make breakfast on our electric stove. I just clicked on the TV. The news reported closings and icy roads, confirming our decision to not try to come into town for work, and I laid back to enjoy our snow day. Since we work six days a week, an extra day off was a special treat to be savored. Sandra got up about eleven and started to make french toast. She had just finished cracking three large brown farm eggs into a bowl, when the lights blinked. We only had time to look at each other before they shuttered again and went out. I still wasn’t worried; it was daylight, the cabin was still warm. I jumped up and called Carroll Electric. I got a series of busy signals before I got through to the answering system. While I was trying to get through, I felt my first pang of nerves, because my phone often went out during bad conditions, and I was anxious to make sure Carroll Electric knew I was without power. But once I was able to get the recorded voice and go through the punch a number game, to report my outage, I felt okay again. Since I got through relatively quickly I didn’t think things were too bad. I’ve had many power outages that only lasted a few hours. We didn’t know how wide spread the problem was, we had no way of knowing. We got in bed and played cards for a while until it started to get cold. I got up and checked the phone but it was dead. That was when it started to sink in that this might not be a day trip and we needed to gather some wood, before it got dark. We had gotten out of the habit, of having fires, because we have one of those freestanding fireplaces that were popular in the sixties. It looks like an upside-down funnel. They are cool looking, but produce very little heat and they can’t be closed until the fire is completely out. So you wake up in the middle of the night freezing and you have to jump up, shut the flue, and crank the heat. This is why we don’t have a handy supply of firewood. After the fire was going, we used the gas grill, on the porch, to cook hamburgers. The outside world looked like something out of a science fiction movie. It was very quiet. The forest was completely white. All the trees were bowed over and everything was jacketed in ice. Occasionally there would be a pop and a crash as a tree branch broke under the weight of its frigid burden. The whole A-frame cabin and porch were incased in ice and the grill had to be chipped free of ice to get the top open and the knobs to turn, but the grill worked fine and we enjoyed our burgers as the sun was going down. The fire did little to keep the house warm so we got under the covers and played one of those trivia box games by candle light. We didn’t play the game by the rules, we divided the cards and took turns asking each other questions. This entertained us until we were ready to go to sleep. Wednesday the power was still out in the morning. It was very cold. My breath was coming out as a thick cloud. I checked the phone, it was silent. While the fireplace wasn’t much, it was still something we could sit beside and feel warmth, so I went to work splitting wood. Sandra went to check her car and when she came back she said a big tree was down right outside the gate and there wasn’t anyway around it. At this point we started to take serious stock in our situation. Back in 97, I was crippled in an accident on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico and my ability to cut trees and haul logs is greatly impaired. Especially in the winter time as cold can make me freeze up. I’ve actually gotten stuck in the yard, because my legs froze in place and I had to teeter walk, a couple of inches at a time, back to the cabin. There was a little juice in my cell phone, but no signal. I knew from experience I would have to walk up the mountain a ways in order to get a call out. The trees towered over me with broken, hanging, branches. Ice constantly rained down on me, but I couldn’t put my hood up, because it kept me from hearing things falling on me. I called several people and got a lot of voice mail. The signal was tenuous so I had to blurt out my information in hopes of getting it out before I would lose the connection. Sometimes I could hear who I was calling, but they couldn’t hear me, so I was never sure when I left a message if anyone would ever hear it. And the battery kept getting lower. I finally got my message to a few people. I would tell them, "This is Alexander. I’m trapped with Sandra at our cabin. Write down this address, call the Sheriff, tell them we’re trapped, low on food and firewood, and we can’t get out." All the time I was outside I noticed that the pops and crashes from falling limbs were increasing in frequency and closing in proximity to me. I got back down the mountain, my legs in so much pain from the trip that I was practically hanging from the old cedar staff I use for a cane at home. Back inside Sandra and I wrapped the veggie burgers in foil and stuck them in the fireplace to heat. Our last food save for old biscuits and bread heals that we’d brought home from work to feed the birds. Periodically I would turn my phone back on and check for messages, because I could get a strong enough signal to check messages in the cabin, but not call out. The popping kept becoming more steady. Sometimes five minutes apart, sometimes multiple pops right on top of each other. Pop is the most accurate way to describe the sound, but not the feeling. Pop is very misleading. Pop sounds like a party favor at a New Years Eve Party and that is a far too friendly a way to describe what was happening. It was loud. Pop! Followed by a long crash as the limb or tree gave way and collapsed to the frozen earth. Some pops were close and hit the roof, others fell in the yard, or echoed through the valley. Every Pop! Felt like a tree dying. The road becoming more treacherous. The house, or car getting crushed. Every Pop! Took us further from getting out. We sat there all day listening to the pounding. Sandra would cover her ears and tell it to stop, but it wouldn’t. It was relentless, never more than five minutes apart and mostly more often than that; all day and into the night. We have one of those wind up radios and every couple of hours we would wind it up and check the news. Nothing we heard, except that the national guard was coming, made us feel any better. It was strange hearing the news report people are trapped when you’re one of those people that are trapped. That night after using up all our trivia cards we started alphabet games. Naming things in the grocery store in alphabetical order and repeating everything each turn until we got to Z. I had split all the rounds of wood we had and I knew it wasn’t enough to burn all night. I tended the fire constantly to make the most of what we had. When I knew it was going to burn down, we all got under the covers, including Baron our dog and Ouzo our little cat. Colby the older cat had made himself a den in one of the closets to keep warm and we didn’t see him much. We left a candle burning, because the yellow light from the flame felt warm, and went to sleep. Thursday morning we were out of food aside from bread. It was strange, I felt no hunger. I don’t think I could have eaten if I’d wanted to. It was like my brain shut down the desire, because it knew there wasn’t much to be had. I got up to go to the bathroom. We had used our last flush the day before and the toilet was smelling like an outhouse. I realized that above that I could smell my own funk through three layers of sweatshirts and a T-shirt. I smiled when I thought to myself that it was like camping. Everything smelled of smoke from the fire. We were using candles for light and the toilet stunk like an outhouse. That was my last smile of the day. While I had been rummaging through drawers looking for candles, I had found the car charger for my cell phone. This was a great relief as it had died the day before. I went and started the car and plugged the phone in. The popping had finally slowed to the occasional reminder. I checked my messages and one said no one was coming and another one said they were already getting us out. I listened intently. In winter, the sound travels through our valley like a speaker, if someone was coming I would have heard a chainsaw. I heard nothing. I went in and told Sandra I thought we were on our own and I was going to try and get the chainsaw started. The chainsaw hadn’t left the shelf in over a year and a half. The injuries, from my time as a commercial diver in the Gulf of Mexico, have left me about as flexible as pavement. Getting the chainsaw started was a monumental task for me. It was so cold that when I opened the chain oil reservoir, it was more like grease than oil. I filled it up and tried to start it, it was so stiff, I could barely get it to turn over. Sandra came out while I was working on it and said she was going to walk the road and see what we were facing. While she was gone I managed to get the chainsaw running and loaded up our little yard wagon with supplies and waited for Sandra. Sandra came back pale with flushed cheeks. She was breathing heavily and took a drink from the juice bottle sitting in our supply wagon before going into detail. "Do you want the bad news?" She said it the way people do when they’re going to say there’s good news too, but she never mentioned any good news. "You can’t make it, Alexander. There over two dozen big trees and all kinds of little ones." She took another drink and panted a little. "My ears are frozen. I had to take my scarf off, because I almost got hit by a branch. I heard the pop and started running and it crashed down where I had been standing." She gasped a few breaths. "I made it to the property line and I had to turn around. I knew if I tried to make it to Granny Wilson’s, I wouldn’t be able to make it back." I wanted to tell myself I could cut us out of there, but I couldn’t even convince myself for a second. There was a time, before my accident, when I could have made it, or even if it had been warm, so I could move a little easier, I could have fooled myself into believing I could, but I knew even with warmth it would take us several days to get out and we were already weak. It was one of the most painful moments of our entrapment, realizing my limitations were putting us in peril. I made another round of calls with little success and less signal. The day was starting to wear on, so we devoted our energy to collecting firewood for that night. Once we had a fire going I put a couple of biscuits on foil to heat and we ate them dry. Neither of us had eaten that day and when Sandra tried to eat she started to get sick. While I was sitting beside her encouraging her to eat I couldn’t help but think of the irony of two people who owned a restaurant dying of starvation. She had to eat the biscuit in tiny bites. When she couldn’t eat any more she gave the last of it to our dog Baron, who was eating better than anyone, because he had food and he was stealing the cats’ food too. He’s got some meaty thighs and we were teasing him that a lot of dogs did just fine with three legs. Huddling under the covers with our candle burning the alphabet game moved onto states. On our first pass we were able to name forty five states, then we got the rest lying there guessing. Then our game became naming things we would like to eat in alphabetical order. We didn’t repeat all of them, as we did in the grocery store game, we just took turns lovingly describing food to each other. We were interrupted by the smell of burning hair and discovered, Ouzo our little cat, had decided to sniff the candle and burned off half her whiskers. That distracted us for a while, checking her out. Aside from having white curly whiskers on one side, instead of the original equipment straight black ones, she was fine. Sandra wanted to put mascara on them to make them match. I talked her out of it and we went back to our game and at some point drifted off to sleep. Something woke me up. It was still dark outside, and the candle was still burning. I looked at the clock. It was a little after one in the morning. I swore I could hear a chainsaw. I shook my head, closed my eyes, then opened them again. Then I thought I saw a flash light coming through the back window and I was sure I had begun to hallucinate. Then there was a loud banging on the back door. I leapt out of bed and ran to the back of the cabin. "Hello?!" I shouted at the flashlight. "Hello!" The flashlight shouted back. "Do you need help? We heard someone needed help back here." "Yes!" I shouted, "We can’t drive out and I can’t hike out." He said they were coming for us and I shouted, "Oh, thank god!" I told him we were in no immediate danger and he asked if we could make it until the next day. I told him we could, then asked him where he was from. His voice boomed "Berryville, Saint John’s!" I thanked him and he turned and walked off into the night. I found out later that he had come in to bring Granny Wilson an oxygen bottle. I guess she told him about us and he went to see what he could do. He had come upon the Pat and Linda Mock cutting their way back to us and hiked passed them to check on us. She was from the sheriff’s office and knew we were in trouble and that nobody was coming for us. Her and her husband took it upon themselves to try and rescue us. They had been cutting for over five hours when the oxygen man reappeared and told them there was too much for them to do that night and they packed it in. Sandra kept repeating what the oxygen man had said. She said it sounded so good. "Berryville! Saint John’s!" We both teared up with relief. We got back into bed and watched our breath rise to the ceiling. We were going to be saved. The next morning I could hear chainsaws. And we were almost giddy, making plans for how we were going to move back into town. We didn’t mind the personal funk, the hunger, or anything else; we were getting out. Then I didn’t hear chainsaws for a while. I would stand at the back window with my ear practically pressed to the screen and I didn’t hear anything. I told myself they must have stopped to rest and eat, but then when I checked again, there still wasn’t any sound. I was to find out later that they thought they were lost and turned back. I went outside with the pole-saw and started cutting tree limbs off the power and phone lines to the cabin. I wanted to do something, anything, that might be proactive. This is when I realized how weak I was. The fiberglass pole-saw felt like is was made out of lead. I felt dizzy and the edges of my vision got a little dark while I was working, but it made me feel better to do something and I managed to get most of it done before I had to lean the saw against a tree and go in. When it started to get late, I told Sandra I better gather some firewood before it got dark. She wasn’t doing well at this point and just kept asking, "Why did they stop? Why won’t they come get us." Sandra is from the coast and used to being able to go to the beach or the pier and look out at the ocean and the mountains make her a little claustrophobic under normal conditions. Being incased in ice with no way out was taking a heavy toll on her. It hurt me to see her tormented by our situation. I remained stoic and supportive, doing my best to reassure her, but I was already starting to believe that we were going to have to get up in the morning, have our biscuit, maybe eat some raw sugar, and start fighting our way out of there no matter how long it took. I went outside and while I was gathering wood I heard voices. At this point I had completely given up hope of rescue from the outside. I didn’t believe I was hearing voices, or rather I did. As I looked up I saw my neighbors Scott and Casey Wilson come around the last bend in the road. I was weak and dehydrated and when I saw them I started shouting, "Hello! Hello!" and they walked up like they were out for a stroll and decided to stop by. I didn’t recognize them right off, because it had been a long time since I’d seen them. The feeling was almost as if I had been standing on the moon and they had suddenly appeared out of a crater. We talked and decided it was too late to try and get out that night and they were going to help me cut some firewood and get us out on Saturday. Then I saw three more men appear around the bend and waved them over. It was the South Carroll County Volunteer fire department, but I’m not sure. I didn’t get a chance to ask them. One of the men asked if I had a way out if they cleared the road and I pointed to my little Tracker. He said, "Well get ready to go." as if we were going to the store. I couldn’t believe it. It was heavy dusk and I thought he was talking about tomorrow. "You mean now? I asked. He said yes and the three of them turned and went back to their trucks. Casey started from our side and the firemen started at the other. It was well after dark when they broke through and fire department guys didn’t even come down so I could thank them and get their names. They just turned around and went to their next rescue. It was late. Sandra and I were exhausted. We had the animals, clothing, and essentials to pack into the car, so we decided to just go to sleep and pack out in the morning. We were very excited and grateful and both talked excitedly, but it didn’t take long to fall asleep. The next morning it was bright and sunny. Almost unnaturally so, because of the sun reflecting off of the ice. We packed up, locked the hubs, and started out. The road which is normally an easy drive, was not. Limbs were sticking out into the road everywhere narrowing the drive and the slush was determined to slide us off the road. It was my first look at the destruction beyond the cabin. Being from the coast I’m used to hurricanes and it looked like the worst hurricane I could imagine had hit. The devastation of the forest was heartbreaking. I also realized Sandra and I would have starved to death before we could have cut our way out alone. All the way out, even when the road widened substantially after we got off our property, I could see even those roads had been completely blocked as well. Looking at it I had to consciously tell myself to breath. I wouldn’t feel safe until we were up on the main road. When we finally made it up to White Oak Road we saw a whole collection of vehicles and found out a lot of them had come to get us, but had fortunately run into one of the Wilson brothers who let them know we were good to go. It warmed our hearts to see all those people and gave us a chance to thank Pat Mock personally, because he was up there with our friend JJ Johnson, who had joined him when he found out we were trapped. JJ had his rock crawler on a trailer and said he was going to get us out, if he had to drag us out. Sandra and I thanked them all. If it had been a movie the camera would have been circling us with a montage of dissolves, while joyous hopeful music was playing and you wouldn’t hear the dialogue. Expressions, smiles, hand shakes, and body language would tell everything you needed to know. It was everything we could both do to keep from breaking down we were so relieved to be free. We said goodbye, both of us grinning like we just won the lottery, and headed into town to turn our office into a home and find a shower. Unknown to us, Emily, who is one of our waitresses and so special to us we call her our daughter and her sister Beth, who also works with us and is very special as well, were in constant contact and trying to figure out what to do. When they called dispatch on Friday, they were told we were out and came to the hotel and found out we weren’t. They went to the sheriffs office to tell them we were not out and they needed to come get us. At one point on Friday I got a garbled message that she and Beth were coming for us on Saturday if we weren’t out. Which I’m glad they didn’t get that far, because they had no idea what they were getting into and I don’t know that they wouldn’t have become an additional rescue to be made. But I love them for trying. Once free of the ice it was time to face the restaurant. Losing a week was bad enough, but when we couldn’t get a straight answer on the power situation on the square, we realized we had to throw out all the food in the refrigerators. We use a lot of fresh ingredients and it really hurt throwing out all that food. It hurt because we care so much about the quality of our ingredients and our homemade dishes. It felt like I was pouring away my art. Pouring paint down the sink and finished sculptures into trash boxes on the floor. Louisiana Chicken and gravy with Little Portions all natural free-range chicken, red beans and rice with real andouille sausage, succulent ham steaks, corned beef, and smoked turkey breast from Ozark Mountain Smokehouse, a whole quiche, big slabs of ham and roast beef, potato salad, homemade chili, gallons of dressing, and more. It seemed to take forever. Now we’re sleeping on the couch in our office and taking showers at Emily’s house, but were healthy, hopeful, and in another day, or so, we’ll have the kitchen restocked. Most of all were grateful to be healthy, alive, and thankful for all the wonderful people, friends and people we didn’t even know, who played a part in freeing us from the ice. |
