A Newfoundland Windstorm Story

When I asked a store keeper in downtown St. John’s when spring hits here, she looked at me and said, “Well, love,” (We’re in Newfoundland. The number of times I’ve been called love, darling, and dear since we got here is approximately one million)…”Well, love,” she said, “sometimes we get a few warm days in April.” And the next day some snow fell, and I laughed about it.

Then the day after that, wind advisories went into effect, and the winds started picking up for the second time since we’ve been here. And while they did their long slow pick up, the snow fell. They said it would be two to four centimeters, but when I looked outside with my untrained American eyes, it looked about three inches (those are different amounts, right?), and the wind kept getting stronger. By noon on Saturday I was cramped and cooped up and decided to pretend we needed things from the store so I could get out of the house. I made it the ten feet to the car, stood gasping at the door, the wind nearly slamming me into it, and turned around and came right back inside.

The second I stepped inside we lost power. It flickered back on, everyone smiled, and then died again, for good.

So, sometimes people come to Newfoundland for the beautiful houses in downtown St. John’s (more on that in a future blog post), or sometimes people come for the curling (“Here for the brier, love?” The waiter asked us at the pizza shop) but sometimes people come and there are blizzards, except stair stepped ones, where the snow falls first and then blows so hard afterwards you cannot even see.

So we thanked our lucky stars and Joe that he had chopped enough firewood for at least a day, and we waited. We explained to two confused boys, who were not old enough to remember the power outages in the typhoons in Okinawa, that Skype didn’t work, that the heaters didn’t work, that the water didn’t work, and that we could not go anywhere, and Joe went over to the next door neighbor to collaborate and confirm.

It turned out the almost the whole city was out of power, and the wind was so strong it was knocking cars off the road and on their heads, and no one knew when anything would be fixed; either the winds or the power.

So we did the Confused Storm Refrigerator Dance (“NOW is it time to open the fridge and move things somewhere colder?”) ended up waiting four hours and carried the milk and eggs down to the frozen basement, and passed juice and sweet vanilla yogurt around like it was Christmas morning, and cut up some potatoes and onions and carrots and wrapped them in shining foil to put on the coals.

And later, when that wasn’t enough, I ad-libbed some half-biscuit half-yeast pizza dough that I’m sure wouldn’t fly on a normal day but that ended up tasting great on a day like this, and put it in the cast iron skillet in the wood stove, taking it out to cover it in pesto and already half-warmed cheese, eating both to the light of a battery lantern that it turned out was the most important thing in the house except for the fireplace.

And we brought a bed down by the fire and dressed the boys in three layers each, and made animal shadows on the living room wall and watched the remaining brave cars brace themselves to stay on the roads.

After bedtime we watched the electric company trucks move slowly down the roads, looking for the place or places where the winds had been too strong, and soon the lights flickered, on and off and on again.

This morning when we woke up, we woke up to news of chimneys ripped from houses, of roofs collapsed in, of 60,000 people without power, and of the strongest winds in 40 years, even stronger than the winds of the hurricane that hit a few years back.

So we woke up glad to a slightly more heated house and went to get pastries and hot chocolate to celebrate heat, and warmth, and strongly built houses.