Scribbles by ME

The Ice Storm from Hell Part 4

Thursday was pretty much a repeat of Wednesday only the temperature was up a bit and some of the local young men tried to remove some of the trees from the road. But, not enough were removed to allow us to get out in either direction of the road.

Rick began to get anxious about his freezer full of meat and nearly hyperventilated on me.  He became deadly serious about trying to get a generator. Only problems were, we have no phone service or battery power to use our phones in order to call about generators. As we listen to the radio we soon discovered that places all over are getting shipments of generators in, but the prices are unbelievable. Hard to believe that outsiders as well as some of your in-town merchants try to make a killing on people in need. We have heard on the radio that Home Depot in Batesville sold out over 100 generators in two hours the day before, and got another shipment in the afternoon selling them out as well. We called friends in the southern part of the state to see if they could locate us one and it was the same deal. People had doubled their prices on the generators.

Finally, the county showed up and cut out the downed trees and telephone poles. We at least could make it to the blacktop, so we prepared to make a trip out. We needed a generator badly. We needed kerosene because we had only half a gallon left. We also needed a phone charger for the car. We bundled up and struck out toward Batesville since it was a larger town and to the south where just maybe the roads and driving would be better.

Wal-Mart was totally out of phone chargers for cars, still out of gasoline containers, lamp oil, their candles started at five dollars which I deemed too pricey, and they still had no kerosene. We went several places looking for generators, but $800-1000 was the going rate and they would arrive later in the day. After going to about five places for kerosene, we finally found a place to buy some. He was selling it at 6.19 a gallon which was pretty good considering the Wal-Mart price was $10 a gallon when they had it. Couldn't find any generators, so we returned home with nothing but the kerosene, but we felt blessed to have even found any.  At least we could keep the house a tepid temperature.

We went home and took alternative measures for the freezer. First, we opened the window to the outside to keep the room cold and then, we sealed off the door with heavy blankets. That would just have to suffice.

The rest of the day was read, sleep, played cards, and listened to the radio until dark so we could go to bed. We made sure we kept the water dripping each night.

At the close of Day 4, we were growing accustomed to our reality.