Ice.
So much ice.
Downed trees everywhere. Impassable roads, driveways, paths.
House roofs groaning under the weight of an 80-foot trunk. Windows smashed by limbs. Sheds crushed. Hours and days of branches snapping and crashing and exploding like gunshots in the woods.
Power poles snapped in half and leaning at crazy angles. Power lines drooping every which way. Hundreds of broken poles, maybe thousands.
Dark houses. Dark stores. Dark offices. Dark, dark, dark, and cold.
From my warm, lit home in downstate Michigan, I scan headlines and read stories and watch social media videos about the storm of a century that still holds northern Michigan in an icy grip. My friends are up there, people I care about, and I can’t help them. As I write this, it’s been nearly a full week since tens of thousands of northerners lost power, and many of them are still waiting for the lights to come back on. For some, it could be another week, the power companies say.
It’s not just the lights, of course. Not in a rural area in a northern Michigan winter.
No heat, unless you’re lucky enough to have a fireplace or a generator. Inside temperatures not much warmer than outside. No hot water to warm your hands. No hot shower. No electricity to charge a phone. No television, no streaming services, no Alexa. No refrigerator. For those on well water — and, in a rural area, lots of folks use well water — no flushable toilets.
No asking the neighbors for help. They’re worse off than you.
Flooded basements. Five, seven feet of water downstairs. Hundreds of calls a day to local water-pumping companies, begging for help.
Hour-long waits in line to fill gas tanks at the one operating gas station in the region.
Snowbirds fretting in Florida, knowing they’ll return home to yardfulls of trees and rancid refrigerators and just wishing they could do something, anything, to help their cold, tired Up North loved ones.
No electricity to plug in a home oxygen tank or charge a wheelchair or keep medications cold. In an area veined with wooded back roads now littered with tree trunks, less chance than ever that an ambulance or fire truck can get there quickly.
In homes already stressed by ill health, underemployment, or mental distress, more trauma. More worry. More isolation and uncertainty. More chance things won’t get better.
Every power outage I’ve experienced has ended with a little pang of regret. You know what I mean, right? After the first flurry of concern, you get used to it, you find the candles, you make plans, and, when the furnace suddenly hums to life and lights pop on, you have that little moment of, Aaw, I was kinda enjoying the adventure.
This is not that kind of power outage.
A week in, and Up Northernites are still struggling, still fighting for their OKness. It hurts to think of.
But the worst can bring out the best. And my people in northern Michigan are proving how abso-stinkin-lutely lovely they are.
In a crisis that impacts everyone, everyone is jumping in and finding someone else to help.
Hours after power started going out, warming shelters cropped up across the frozen region, complete with cots and snacks and hot dogs on the grill. Restaurateurs emptied their coolers and fired up food trucks and cooked hot meals for anyone who was cold.
Neighbors checked on neighbors, inviting them to share fireplace warmth or plug in a phone. A pet store proprietor offered respite to warmth-dependent critters. The sheriff made sure the animal shelter got a generator.
The local cement plant offered first responders gas for their vehicles. National Guardsmen grabbed chainsaws to help DNR officers clear roads. Grocery store employees used flashlights to help desperate customers find food in dark aisles.
Local officials launched the Emergency Operations Center they perfected during the pandemic, orchestrating calm in the chaos. Firefighters and EMTs and police officers and other people-servers stepped up, geared up, and put in long days. Journalists with no power at home kept telling the story of communities that are anything but powerless.
I would never wish a calamity on any community. But when one happens, we get a glimpse of what we are capable of, and of the depth of our capacity to care.
Soon, out-of-area news outlets will stop reporting on northern Michigan’s historic ice storm. The EOC will pack up its dry erase markers, and the warming shelters will turn back into township halls and fire stations and churches. Residents will tell and retell their stories, clean the branches out of their yards, and go back to work, a little more grateful for outlets and light switches that work. Eventually, even the smell of mildewy basements will subside, and roofs will get repaired, and communities will feel normal once again.
But under that normalcy lies the crisis that was there all along, before the ice and the power lines and the flooded basements.
Everywhere, in even the nicest of nice little towns, people are hurting. Mothers are scrambling to evade eviction. Children are cowering under raised fists. Young men who hate themselves are escaping into chemicals. Teen girls hungry for validation are stepping ever closer to danger. Great-grandparents are crumbling into loneliness.
When I remember all the individual crises around me, my chest thumps and my eyes close and I want to run, somewhere I can’t see or think or know about any of it. I have my own crises to deal with. I can’t be in constant crisis mode for other people. It’s too much. It’s a thousand trees down. It’s powerlessness.
But, I tell myself, none of us has to fix all of it alone.
My wish for my dear Up North is that, as it recovers from this colossal challenge, it remembers that some people face colossal challenges every day. My wish is that it finds renewed, united strength to not only return to normal, but to make normal better.
And I want to look to the noble response of those beleaguered northerners and let it inspire in me a new resolve to look for the crises in other homes — and then lend my hands and heart to do something.
I can’t empower everyone. But maybe I can share my warmth to get someone through a cold time. Maybe I can help them recharge or let my tiny light make their darkness a little less dim.
I won’t do it perfectly. But imagine if all of us kept crisis mode turned on, at least a little. Imagine if all of us decided other people need to be OK, too.
What a storm of caring that might be.
------------
If you have the urge to contribute to relief efforts Up North — and they do, truly, need relief — the Community Foundation for Northeast Michigan is collecting Urgent Needs funds to provide immediate assistance to local nonprofits serving people facing hardship due to the storm’s aftermath.
Donations can be made online at cfnem.org. Checks can be mailed to CFNEM P. O. Box 495, Alpena, MI 49707. I can vouch for the organization and trust them to use donations the right way.
But your community needs your efforts, too. Help people who are helping people, wherever they may be.
Photo credit: my friend Darby, who has power back now. Yay!
