Hypernation

Animal wisdom tells us that this is the time of year to lay low, to snooze--round the clock if possible. The thermometer is regularly below zero, the once-mellow meadows resemble the surface of the moon. Frogs are frozen freaking solid within the stony mud. But human contrariness insists that this is the time to get everything done, despite the brevity of bleak winter days. A dozen different projects are ramping up to speed all around the station. Fortieth anniversary events, concert plans, next month's member drive, the website redesign, conferences and collaborations, construction work. It never stops.

It all makes me, I confess, a little sleepy. But it must be the same impulse that got Cro-Magnon man through the last Ice Age: Want to stay warm?--Keep running. Just one more day on the trail and it's mammoth blubber for everybody! Unfortunately, it always seems to be the trail today, and the blubber tomorrow. And so it will go until the lilacs bloom. Until then, keep moving, and drink lots of hot chocolate.

Speak of the devil

I was starting to feel a little nostalgic about disaster, listening to the retrospective coverage of Ice Storm '98--right up until everything started to fall apart again. The massive thaw of the last week presented its bill with hurricane force winds. The campus went dark, the network and phones went dead. The website was kerflooey (a technical term). The transmitter was running on generator. Power surges melted my computer. It was a classic case of "speak of the devil."

Fortunately Lucifer didn't hang around quite as long this time. And there were some lessons learned. When the land lines went down, the cell phones came out. When the campus lost power, parts of the network stayed up on generators, as did our transmitter shack. There were workarounds for almost everything, from getting audio to the station to getting cancellations and closings out to the community--laborious maybe, suboptimal, but workable. Without the example of 10 years ago we would have been down to tin cans and a string.

So thanks for sending in your recollections of Ice Storm '98. But maybe in the future, we should just remember in our hearts. Not that I'm superstitious.

Ready or not

It's been ten years since the Ice Storm (always capitalized) administered its mighty dope-slap to the North Country. If you can remember what healthy woods are supposed to look like, you can still make out the edges of the devastation when entering or leaving the region. It'll be another decade before all the debris has mulched back into duff. But good intentions decompose more quickly. Looking around the house now I see that we still have no heat source that doesn't require electricity, and that the battery stash has long been looted of anything containing an erg of oomph. The candles looked quite romantic burning down to nubs on the dinner table, and the canned goods supply is down to one portion of cream of asparagus soup and some ripe olives.

It may just be that constant vigilance is an oxymoron. Nervous fatigue sets in. How long can you look into every shoe and never find a bomb? How long before we rebuild on the floodplain or the coastline or the flank of the volcano? And if, somehow, we stayed prepared for disaster, would it be for the next one, or for the last one? I can remember when they decommissioned the public fallout shelters and disposed of all the stock. Half the North Country stored old baby clothes and sundry in sturdy brown barrels with a yellow Civil Defense logo on the side. Every science classroom was stocked with an almost-new Geiger counter. And I bet it's not that hard now to find a good price on a used power generator: "1998 Honda 2 KW, low hours, runs like new."

Share your received wisdom (if you have received any) from the Ice Storm of '98. Drop us a line at radio@ncpr.org.

Tough sledding

Radio Bob is on arctic safari today, hauling radio gear by snow machine up through the ice fields on Blue Mountain. If his mission to replace our damaged antenna is a success, we will be able to stop apologizing to everyone in the central and southern Adirondacks, who have had the insult of no radio added to the injury of a late spring storm. The Blue Mountain facility is a central distribution point for us, feeding our signal on to other transmitters in North Creek, Lake George, Glens Falls, Newcomb and Speculator. We hope to have good news soon. Thanks to everyone for their patience.

This has been a tough week for public broadcasting infrastructure in the North Country. Mountain Lake PBS suffered the collapse of its 400-foot broadcast tower during bad weather on Lyon Mountain. On the other hand, it looks like cell-phone service will soon be extended onto the currently uncovered stretches of the Northway, with the just-announced agreement between the Spitzer administration and Verizon.

It pays to be humble before the power of the weather, though as it turns out, the weather will humble us whether we agree or not. But this just in—the good news I hinted at above--Radio Bob reports the fix is done, and all the transmitters are on. Weather permitting, of course.

Disconnect

David just walked down the hall to announce, “the internet’s down—and it’s snowing.” Another practically perfect day in “the cruelest month.” There are still things I could do: whittle a banana, whittle a monkey to hold the banana, whittle a tree to hold the monkey. But as web manager, I’ve got nothing to manage—the Maytag repairman of cyberspace. I know that NCPR.org is still out there, but it’s like the train that runs by Folsom Prison, out of reach beyond the razor-wire of the University firewall. I can write these words, but it’s a message in a bottle—no one will ever see them until they have been mooted by the industrious geeks of IT. I could catch up with some old friends, but my contact list has nothing but email addresses. I could continue my research for tonight’s poetry show, but there’s nothing in my notes but website URLs. There’s a poem by a friend--on my website, there are things I could make reference to—in my blog. There are sound clips I could use—in the online archive. Twice now the connection has come back on, only to swoon again in less than a minute: “No! Wait!”—then nothing but my forlorn claw marks in the dust on the screen. How could something that didn’t even exist a little while ago become the center of the universe? Shall I burn incense? Try the Tinkerbell technique? I look out at the snow, but it gives me no information.

No picnic

Even with a late start, such as this winter got, by February the cold gets old. The brutality of northern February drives up depression rates, drinking, random acts of violence, self-slaughter. Clearly, a preternatural blowout holiday is called for. But the selection available to us is frankly depressing. Groundhog Day? Unpromising. We wish there were only six weeks left. There’s Lincoln’s birthday and Washington’s birthday, both now rolled together into something called Presidents Day, but where’s the party in that? Everyone has at least one president they wouldn’t celebrate at gunpoint; some have many. Discussing one’s views on the topic, particularly over strong drink, is not recommended. And then there’s Valentine’s Day, which is basically a bummer for anyone not deranged by the throes of new-found passion.

China and Tibet have the good sense to postpone their New Year into February. Dragons and fireworks—now there is something to work with. And Ottawa, on seeing nothing taller than a fencepost between them and the North Pole, wisely invented Winterlude. If you’re going to be hanging around outside chipping ice, you might as well eat some deep-fried dough. But if we’re going to borrow a celebration from foreign parts, I vote to borrow from the Buddhists. On their calendar, today is Nirvana Day. The possibilities are breathtaking.