Fire and Ice BY ROBERT FROST Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice. (http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/fire-and-ice/)
It was on the second day that the freezing began. The snow slapped against the window as I slept in the early hours of the morning. I heard my father rummaging around for his morning coffee at around 3 o’clock on his way to the factory. Five minutes later, he returned to the house, unable to leave the driveway. I drifted off again into dreams of Christmas gifts and the swoosh of skis in powder. I woke a couple hours later to feel the springs buckling as my sister jumped on my rickety old mattress. “No school!” she screamed. “Shut up,” I said. In all my twelve years I had never seen anything so strange. I threw on my boots and ran downstairs, opening the door into below zero weather that shook me to my bones. What had once been slush now glistened a little, sparkling. When I raised my eyes higher, the whole world seemed to be shimmering. Ice glossed the trees, and they were rendered white as ghosts. The moon was reflected in all its perfect roundness on the street, as if our road had been replaced with a pane of glass. As I watched, a strong oak capitulated to the wind, falling with a
tremendous crash in the woods, and all of a sudden the twinkling lights in the windows of my neighbors began to extinguish, one by one, until the entire neighborhood was completely engulfed in blackness. I smiled, because I could not help myself. It was just too beautiful.
As day two passed, my father paced angrily. “We have to go to the gas station,” he said as I warmed my numb hands in front of the wood stove. “We need fuel for the generator.” As we drove, the car began to drift across the street like a child learning how to skate. I could see my father’s white knuckles on the steering wheel. Trees lay on power lines, houses, and across streets, lying just where they fell, waiting for someone else to come pick them up. Their branches refracted light like so many diamond chandeliers in our path. The car skidded down the road, and it seemed to me to be smaller than it ever had been. I was powerlessly captivated by it, caught in a tug-of-war between running for my life and lifting a hand out the window to caress a passing branch. But while my father stared straight ahead, teeth gritted, I pressed my nose to the glass. The gas station was completely mobbed. One hundred men and women stood waiting in the cold with identical red-nozzled jugs in their hands, waiting for a chance at liquid light. The sharp smell of raw gas was in the air like perfume. I watched as my father joined them, waiting for his ration of gasoline. He soon blended into the crowd with his brown coat and slumped posture, a single man in a heaving sea.
Day three came with a creaking of the tired trees, and I saw the steam of my breath in front of me as I sat up in bed. I looked out the window, out at the rest of the neighborhood. Half of it had been evacuated, windows dark, doors locked.
“Power on yet?” “No,” said my mother grimly. “They’re opening up the high school for evacuees today.” “Any other news?” I asked as I heated up some hot chocolate over the fire. My mother looked at me over the rims of her glasses. “A man in Francestown was found in his house yesterday. Dead. He… he froze.” I looked at the ice that clung to the trees and hated it with all the electricity I could muster.
Days four, five, six, seven, and eight passed. Some of my time I spent by the crackling fire with piles of books at my feet, curled up on the red Oriental rug, caught in the mechanical whisper of the generator. I measured time in the dripping wax of candles and the sweeping arc of the sun behind smoky gray clouds, the crisp flick of pages turned. Random pages in my father’s atlas took me to places I could scarcely imagine, and I planned my adventures: Patagonia, the Sahara, Malta, Mongolia, the Arctic Circle.
In the afternoon, friends in need of running water made the slippery trek to our front door, filling canteens and reveling in hot showers. We, the children, dried our hair in front of the wood stove, shaking it out like dogs until the droplets sizzled on the surface and we laughed. We perched on the rug while the adults sat at the kitchen table and told each other our deepest secrets. When we ran out of secrets, we made them up. Our brows seemed to stay furrowed, though, no matter how much we laughed. Soon I ventured out into the woods, turned into faceted diamond and crystal with ice. My feet crunched over the snow as I ventured miles into the forest, staring up at the sky. There was no power. People were living out in the cold. I had to escape from the trucks that came from Quebec, from Massachusetts, from Indiana, to lift trees off broken houses with cranes. They removed thick trunks from fizzling power lines, and their engines roared night and day. Roads were closed, businesses locked to the outside world. The old man on Main Street had fallen too, and his heart had stopped beating, and then they had found him. He had died in his house. Perhaps it was just us, that we were too weak, too warm, and too fickle to battle. Perhaps the sheer magic of it all was too extreme for us to handle. Yet the forest bore the marks of damage as well. I found fallen tree after fallen tree, not able to take the weight, dead on the ground. Wandering out of the forest, I walked onto the ice of an expansive marsh. The air rang with the crackling of my footfalls where all had once been silent. Before I knew it, a tear had fallen on my cheek, and another, and another. With its glittering superficiality, the ice had stabbed through the core of my childish world, magical in its naĂŻvetĂŠ. I was sickened by how beautifully apathetic the ice was, not caring who it broke on its
journey up the trunks of trees and the scaffolding of houses. As the tears themselves began to freeze into ice on my cheeks, I let out a howl of betrayal. That which was beautiful was not mine. The sun, weak and small, fell below treeline. I wished that the mountains, imprisoned in their silver sheaths, could hear me cry. But the only thing that answered me was another resounding crack in the distance as another tree drowned in the ocean of frozen jewels. They were the gems that scraped the whole world raw.
For many people, the lights came back on after ten days. It took a little longer for us. The first thing I heard was the beep of the microwave on the night of the twelfth day. It sounded like a signal sent from another planet, so foreign that I did not realize what it was until the green numbers on the time screen lit up the kitchen. I heard the joyful singsong voices of my neighbors as their lights began to glow, one by one, in their windows. “The ice storm of ‘08,” the townies call it, pushing it further back into the past with every winter gone, winters without the menace of the ice and the dark. Every year, they try to forget the cold that crept into their bones, the wrinkles that formed between their brows. As the snow sparkles in the air, children whisper from windows in classrooms, waiting for the moment they will be able to reach out their tongues and let the snow melt on it like magic. The lights never turned back on for me. The ice never released the trees, never dripped from branches like glistening teardrops in the bleak sun. The roads were never cleared, and the town never gasped its first ragged breath after the storm. Spring never came.
In hot, parched summers, I stare at fragrant petals of Indian paintbrushes that look like circular sunsets. I hear the quiet buzzing of bees. I travel from mountaintop to mountaintop until my feet bleed. Sometimes I almost forget about it, until all that glitters slips its vagabond daggers between my ribs. When it does, I begin to look around me. I see that there is a ghostly layer that only I can feel, hovering over every superficially beautiful thing, every insouciant soul. It is a subtle cast of ice.