Ice Age

The kid is staying with his father. It's the first weekend we get to ourselves in what feels like ages and so we decide to go somewhere just because we can. We drive to Fredericksburg which is a little over seventy miles north of San Antonio. Cold weather is on the way but we haven't felt it so much in the city, so we're curious about how it may have affected the surrounding counties. We drive north, then at some point just past the town of Comfort we notice that the landscape has changed. We left San Antonio driving cautiously, just like everyone else because the roads are icy. Now we're the only people left on what is ordinarily a relatively busy highway, and everything is either white or grey. I suddenly remember reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

Fredericksburg itself is stranger still. The temperatures have dipped to around ten degrees below zero during the night and everything has frozen, I guess mostly with moisture drawn from the air. Each blade of grass, each leaf, each individual twig is encased in a sleeve of transparent glass of about a half centimetre thickness. There isn't really any snow, nor even anything you could call frost, just this slightly sinister coating of ice everywhere you look. It's not like anything I've ever seen, and having lived in a much colder part of the world for the first forty-five years of my life, I assumed I pretty much knew all there was to know about ice and snow. We last five minutes on the streets of Fredericksburg. It's too cold, hardly anywhere is open, and the sidewalk planters full of doomed succulents embedded in blocks of knobbly ice are depressing; so we get in the car and drive home.

We've been having trouble with the snow guard under the car - a large metal panel preventing snow and ice getting up into the underside of our Honda Civic. A speed bump dislodged it a few months back, bringing it down to scrape loudly against the road surface when in motion. The car is so low to the ground that we can't get under to do anything about the rear edge of the sheet still being bolted to the chassis. My wife took the car to a garage where they bolted the trailing edge back up. Bess had actually asked them to remove the thing entirely, and sure enough it dropped back down again about a month later; then seemed to right itself, or snap off, or something.

Now, on the way back to San Antonio, just as we pass through Comfort, a sudden, deafening and terrifying racket starts up which suggests we're about to crash, or that the entire front end of the car has fallen away and is being ground into the asphalt by our forward motion. We pull to the side of the highway, amazed to be alive, and an inspection reveals it's the fucking snow guard again - hanging down and forward, angle-grinding itself into oblivion yet still somehow attached so we can neither fix the thing, shove it back up, nor yank it off.

We drive on with forty or fifty miles ahead of us. We'll stop if we see a garage but nowhere is open due to the weather conditions. Our snow guard must surely be one of the most deeply ironic features ever to come with a car sold to someone living in San Antonio, Texas. We drive slowly and our journey is accompanied by loud industrial music playing beneath the car for most of the journey - a constant cement mixer grind combined with distant squeals and screeches lasting about forty minutes until the snow guard breaks off, or feels better, or whatever other mystifying reason accounts for its sudden silence. The noise was such that, had I a means of recording it, I would have done so. I could have named it after the work of some racist Japanese author and released it on Bandcamp with a photograph of dead leaves for the cover.

It snows on Sunday and the temperature plummets to something like twenty below, specifically 9° Fahrenheit. I'm not convinced I've ever existed at 9° Fahrenheit. We get about three inches of snow. I've covered the vulnerable plants in the garden but - let's face it - they're probably fucked at these temperatures. The water bowl I leave outside under the porch for the cats is a solid block of ice and that's sheltered, so a bit of cloth probably isn't going to save the Chrysanthemum or Esperanza at the other end of the garden. More worrying is our bewilderingly crappy hot water pipe which winds its way out of the garage wall, around the flower beds, then into the house at the other side like a plumbing afterthought. About half of its length is beneath the patio but the rest is exposed, presumably because frost isn't a problem in Texas.

We have thirteen cats, although two of them aren't really ours and won't come in the house even when invited. Of the other eleven, usually more than half of them spend the night outside doing cat stuff, but we have all of them inside on Sunday evening. The three least likely to start jumping up and down on either of us at 3AM get to stay in our bedroom, and the others have the rest of the house.

Miraculously, Monday morning comes and there are no lakes of protest urine or strategically misplaced turds to greet us as we rise. Also, there's no hot water, although the cold seems to be coming through fine. I spend an hour trying to defrost the pipe first using a tiny kitchen blow torch, then boiling water, and my wife later has a go with a hairdryer on an extension chord, but to no avail. We've also lost internet access, telephone, and television. We have power, although the electric company wants us to use as little as possible because a lot of the city is blacking out. It feels a little like the end of civilisation.

I go out around noon in five layers of clothing and wellington boots, but HEB, the local supermarket is closed as are all the other stores on Austin Highway. I need cat food. We have several sacks of the dry stuff, but we'll have a lot of deeply unhappy cats if I try to fob them off with that first thing in the morning. I trudge gradually up the Austin Highway. There are no vehicles on the road, and Walmart is also closed. I keep going, all the while bitterly reflecting on all those useless arseholes who drive massive trucks quite specifically designed for conditions such as these, most likely presently stuck back at the mansion house weeping over some game involving a bouncy ball having been snowed off.

Amazingly, Target is open. They're expensive and their selection of human food is oddly crappy and conspicuously lacking in certain areas, but they have cat food. I usually buy whatever I'm going to cook for Bess and myself during my daily trip to the store, but we probably have enough stocked up as to allow for some improvisation. The queue in Target is about two-hundred yards long snaking around the store, allowing for social distancing measures. I stand behind a guy who has apparently braved the apocalyptic freeze to buy a miniature barbecue grill. Somewhere behind I can hear some Alamo Heights Barbie doll whining, ohmagerd I can't believe they closed everywheyar. Maybe she lives in Target and hasn't actually been outside today. Maybe she doesn't understand what snow is.

It's still cold on Tuesday and we're still without hot water. We have a huge ten gallon stainless steel pot designed for cooking whole turkeys - although neither Bess nor I have any idea why we have it or where it came from - which we now use to boil water. It takes a while, but if we fill it about half full and work in shifts with additional top-up water boiled in smaller pots and pans at the same time, it takes about two hours to get a hot bath going. It feels like civilisation is hanging on, and Logan calls by in the afternoon, bringing us a huge bottle of clean water. He's heard that the water supply may go altogether so he's just trying to be a good neighbour. The supermarket is still closed. I spend the afternoon working on something called I Mentioned It Once, but I Think I Got Away With It which requires time spent looking things up in diaries and related correspondence written during the nineties and then the first decade of this century. It's actually a little depressing, but I realise that even life in this deleted scene from The Road beats my twenties and thirties, most of which were spent trying to distract myself from my own misery.

On Wednesday the city asks us to boil any water we intend to consume, which chimes somewhat with Logan's suggestion that the entire infrastructure is at the point of collapse. That said, our hot water is back, albeit at what is obviously reduced pressure. It feels like progress. Tuesday was sunny and the Texas sun is strong even at this time of year, clearing away most of the snow in just a day. Wednesday is overcast, so what snow we still have remains as it is, but the temperature climbs above freezing during the afternoon.

It snows again on Thursday, but the water pressure is back up and we have full internet access once again. At noon, I head out to the store because Randy has told us that it was open for a couple of hours on Tuesday afternoon. I wear five layers of clothing and wellington boots, as before. I stand in a queue in the snow outside HEB for about forty minutes. Once I've shuffled the several hundred yards to the front, I find they have no meat, no dairy, no milk, no eggs, and not a whole lot of anything else; but thankfully they have cheese and cat food. The cashier tells me that the huge distribution centre on I-35 hasn't had power all week.

In the evening we go out to eat at Cazadores, a Mexican diner just around the corner from our house. It's the only place we've seen open all week, although Siete Leguas was apparently doing business earlier in the day.

Friday morning brings more sun, and this second lot of snow - again a good three inches - is gone by the early afternoon where it would most likely have been hanging around for three or four miserable days if this were England. I lift the garden blankets to inspect the damage. The chrysanthemum looks okay but I'm guessing everything else is fucked.

Maybe some of them will recover once spring gets underway.