Robin Surgelées

 

So, for those of you playing at home, let me bring you up to speed.

Texas has decided to enter a new ice age. Now, I was raised, spent my formative years, and worked for quite awhile in most of the the heavily-winter-iced mostly-geometric-shaped "flyover" states in the northern tier. I have, in fact, always prided myself a bit on the fact that I'm one of the few people I know down here in By-God-Texas who have spent upwards of ten days in a row on multiple occasions working outside in below-zero conditions. (This of course does not apply to people in Amarillo or vicinity, which is the original source of the phrase "Colder Than A Well-Digger's Ass".)

On the other hand, I got damned tired of it, which is how I wound up down here in the first place. I know exactly when the decision was made:

January XX, 199X, 3:10 AM.

That was the night that for the first half of the shift I was working in a screaming blizzard, and the second half in a less-dramatic blizzard. The absolute temperature was in the vicinity of -12F and with the wind chill was more like -35F. The roads were sheets of glazed ice, with literally zero exposed asphalt or concrete. Everything was frozen solid and slicker than snot on a glass doorknob. 

 I had just gotten done working a three-car accident in which everyone just sort of drift-slid into everyone. Why anyone was out that time of day in the first place, never mind approaching a major intersection at 30-35 MPH on a sheet of oiled glass was a complete mystery, one I never solved.

As the wreckers finally yellow-flashed down the road dragging the remains, I climbed back into my car to write up the report. I wore heavy leathers, quilted vest, two sets of long-johns, bunny boots, double-thick gloves — I had so much shit on I could barely squeeze under the steering wheel. All my pens were frozen and had to be put directly into the blasting windshield-defrost grate to thaw them enough to make a mark.

I finally managed to finish the report, titled it "Dumbass vs Dumbass vs Dumbass, No Humans Involved", (which I expected they were going to make me change before the insurance poeple got a copy) and dropped the tire-chained car into "Drive". I was trying to make the 15-minute, 3/4 of a mile drive to a snow-drifted Mini Mart for some crappy coffee which had the single virtue of being lava-hot. 

But before I could even get moving, two cars hove into view and pirouetted past each other in the same intersection I'd just gotten cleaned up. They looked like an Olympic ice-dancing team, swirling matching loops past each other so closely that I'd have been hard pressed to slip a playing card between them. Both rocked to a stop at a 90-degree angle to each other and, even from where I was watching, I could see both drivers staring with open-mouthed shock at how close they'd been to disaster. They looked like ghosts.

I drove between them, ghosts looking at me from each side, and kept right on going. Didn't stop at the Mini Mart, either. I drove completely out of my assigned district, across town, and went home.

I stomped through the front door and into the bedroom and woke The Beneficiary. I stood there bulked up to about 3 times my normal size, what with all the padding, steam cooking off me in the warm house. My scarf crackled with ice accumulated from my breath as I unwrapped it.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"Nothing," I replied, "but get used to this: I'm not doing this anymore. We're moving south next year if we have to live on fucking welfare."

For a moment she studied me standing there dripping on her carpet.

"OK," she said.

And we did. As she later told her family, in late spring we loaded up our Beverly Hillbillies pickup and a good-sized U-Haul and stuck a snow-shovel upright behind the cab and kept driving south till someone looked at it and said "What the hell is THAT thing?"

Been here since.

And today I'm stuck at home because of drifting snow and single-digit temps. Worst in history, they say. I was out on the property getting things sealed in and discovered a frozen robin on the front porch. Not sure how that happened, since the cardinals, waxwings, and OBBs (Ordinary Brown Birds) seem to be doing fine. It's clearly too early for springtime harbingers.

OK, Texas, I've lived in jungles before, and I can do it again. You're not my last option. You got one week to clean this shit up, and next time I see any more than a 1/2" fairy-dusting of frost, I'm loading up the snow-shovel and heading south again.

Caveat: It occurs to me that this whipsaw cold might drive off some of the California assholes that have been moving in and trying to turn us into another San Francisco-style third-world shithole, utterly ignoring the fact that they moved here to get away from that clusterfuck in the first place.

(Local joke:
First Guy: Want to hear the most annoying sound in the world?
Second Guy: Sure, go ahead.
First Guy: "We just moved here from California!")

Too much to hope for I suppose, but on consideration, I'll take freezing my dangly bits off if it means not having to put up with goofball lefty granola-eaters any day.  Hmmm. We'll see how it goes.

Incidentally, since this gets posted using Texas-style internet, it may or may not be up before too long. Our problem is that the internet froze along with everything else, and seems to be deader than my porch robin. Hard telling when it will be back.