The homesteading community is made up of several different camps: some take to it in an effort to eat healthier; some want a simpler, less materialistic life and some are preparing for a global catastrophe that will wipe out civilization leaving the ultra-prepared and self-sufficient to inherit the earth. That last group can be a little over-the-top in their beliefs, but there is no doubt that one of the key advantages in living a more sustainable lifestyle is being able to more easily deal with natural and man-made disasters, situations often referred to as "when Sh*t Hits The Fan" or by its acronym, SHTF. I personally experienced one of those SHTF moments 40 years ago this week, January 26, 1978; what those of us who lived through it call the Great Blizzard of '78.I was a high school sophomore at the time, living with my parents and older sister in the tiny hamlet of Gypsum, Ohio. Gypsum was, and is, an isolated community of 50 or so families located along the shores of the Sandusky Bay about five miles from the nearest town, Port Clinton. If you asked either of my parents whether they were "homesteaders" they would have looked at you like you were crazy, but the way our family lived had a lot in common with what we would today consider modern homesteading. We had a huge garden -- about 1/4 of our half-acre lot, did most of our own mechanical and home maintenance work, canned or froze our excess produce, bartered goods and services with our neighbors, and, although we did not raise livestock ourselves, we annually bought a side of beef from a local farm, had it butchered and kept it in our basement freezer.
Our morning routine was pretty consistent. Dad would get up around 5:30, make a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon and coffee so strong you could use it to remove a rusty lug nut, then pack his lunch and head off to work at the U.S. Gypsum plant a half-mile down the road. Somewhere during that time my mother would rise and get me up to catch the school bus which stopped at our house right around 7:00. My sister, who worked the late shift at a diner in town, was generally still asleep when I left.
On the morning of January 26th, all this played out more or less according to script until dad returned home from work just about the time I was heading to the bus stop. He said that they had closed the plant because a blizzard was moving in from the west. That seemed a little weird, because it wasn't even freezing and there was just a mist of light rain in the air. Within minutes, though, the rain turned heavier and began to freeze, laying down a sheet of solid ice on everything. The electricity went out about the time it began to snow around 8:00 and shortly after that the wind picked up and the temperature plummeted. In that part of Ohio, snow, wind and cold were hardly a novelty but this felt different. The wind blew violently against the wooden siding of our old house, giving the sense that the whole structure was shaking apart. Dad switched the portable radio we kept on the kitchen table over to battery power and tuned in the local station. WRWR was a low power FM station that served greater Ottawa County with local news, gossip, farm reports and an occasional top-40 song from a tiny studio and transmission tower located a couple miles from our house. It featured the sort of hodge-podge programming where Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit might be sandwiched between an update on corn futures and "Out and About in Vacationland with Karen Messner." On that particular morning though, all attention was on the weather. Two huge depressions had merged over the upper Midwest, creating a winter storm of almost unprecedented fury. By the time the leading edge of this storm had reached us in the early hours of the morning, places farther west like Ft. Wayne, Indiana and Lansing, Michigan were already experiencing a "white hurricane" with wind gusts up to 100 miles per hour, whiteout snow and wind chills plunging to -60 degrees. It was right around that point we realized this wasn't going to be just an inconvenience, like most of the winter storms we endured, but an actual life-threatening event.
Our house had a gas furnace, but the pump that moved the heated water through the system was electric, so it was of no practical value without electricity, and the temperature inside the house was falling rapidly. We did not have a fireplace upstairs, but dad had installed a pot-belly wood stove in the basement so that he could keep it warm while he worked down there during the winter. We woke my sister and all moved down to the basement where we gathered around the stove while dad got a fire started.
Our basement wasn't exactly "finished," and it wasn't the sort of place anyone wanted to spend much time. It was a dark and damp with cement block walls and a concrete floor. There as a rusty old 1950's refrigerator where dad kept beer, nightcrawlers and dog food, and a gas oven that mom used as an auxiliary when she was canning in the summer or baking in quantity, as she did every Christmas and Easter. The walls were lined with shelves of canned goods and mower parts and the ceiling rafters were studded with nails festooned with junk dad had picked up from clearance bins at discount stores, a sort of hobby of his. It was also where we stored our lawn furniture during the winter, so we quickly set up a circle of web chairs and lounge recliners around the now-roaring fire. We had brought the portable radio with us and listened as caller after caller chimed in with their stories of being stranded at work or in some gas station along the highway. Despite our rather meager conditions, we felt fortunate to have roof over our heads and a warm place to sit down.
I was going through my marine biologist stage at the time and had a rather impressive collection of tropical fish in two 20 gallon aquariums. A couple of hours into the ordeal it dawned on me that without electricity to run the heaters the water would cool below the survival zone (60-80 degrees) for my fish. Sure enough, the air temperature upstairs had fallen to 50 degrees and the water in the tanks was around 60 and dropping. It is for all practical purposes impossible to move a 20 gallon tank filled with fish and water. I got the idea of boiling tap water in a pot on the gas stove and then adding that to the tanks to keep the temperature in an acceptable range, but tap water is chlorinated and I wasn't completely sure whether heating it would remove the chlorine, which is poisonous to fish. Then it hit me; what was snow? Frozen water. For the next few days, I kept a pot of hot snowmelt on the stove, replenishing the water in the fish tanks and keeping them at an ideal 70 degrees. While I didn't really grasp it at the time, I had given myself a task and a purpose which helped to pass the time.
As claustrophobic as the situation seems to me now, I don't remember going "stir crazy." We had the radio and we had books and some oil lamps for light. I guess I was too young and naive to be frightened, although looking back on it I probably should have been. After all, it was nothing more than dumb luck that we had enough wood to keep the stove going for several days. Dad had felled a dead tree for an elderly relative the previous summer and had stacked the wood out against our shed. It as more wood than he would have normally used in five years, but there it was. Food wasn't really an issue either. We had weeks worth of canned vegetables and the better part of half a side of beef in the freezer. That did beg the question; how long will it stay frozen? It turns out that dense frozen goods like beef will stay frozen for days in an insulated freezer. And we really weren't that concerned because if worse came to worst it was zero outside and we could always just bury it in the snow.
The snow let up on the afternoon of the 27th and eventually gave way to crystalline blue skies and an otherworldly, snow-blasted landscape. As we started to dig out and check on the well-being of the neighbors it became apparent that it would be days before we could reach town. The snow was drifted up higher than the roof of our neighbor's single story house. Unfortunately, he worked the 11 to 7 shift and was one of those stuck at work when the storm hit. Thankfully, all of our other immediate neighbors were in a similar position as us; gardens and canning and oil lamps and firewood were basic ways of life in rural Ohio in the 1970's.
As reports came across the radio, the magnitude of the disaster began to hit home. Millions without power across the Midwest. Roads closed from Chicago to Buffalo. Dozens dead. In our own neighborhood, drifts fifteen feet high rippled across the fields like dunes across the Sahara. The mechanics of airflow had left the side of our house facing the road in relatively good shape, just a foot or 18 inches, and we quickly dug that out, but the other side as buried halfway up the first floor windows. We did not have a garage at the time and our cars were all but completely buried. It would be another two days before the plows and earth-movers finally managed a single-wide trench down the road connecting our house to the main road a half-mile away. Dad and I bravely volunteered to make the treacherous trip into town for "supplies." In retrospect, I think by that point dad would have gladly stormed the beach at Normandy just to get out of that basement.
We knew from the radio that only a couple of stores were open, one of them being Greene's Drug in downtown Port Clinton. Mom made up a list of things she needed, including a refill of her diabetes pills (I don't think she was close to running out but wanted them as a precaution), batteries and a couple of magazines. The drive into town was unlike anything I have experienced since. There were places where the drifted and plowed snow formed banks along the road 20 feet high as we navigated a trench only slightly wider than our car. The road was a rutted mosaic of ice that cracked and popped under our wheels. It took us half an hour to make what was usually a 10-minute drive, but it was nice just to be outside and moving.
The drug store, as you might imagine, was pretty well picked over, but at least we got mom's medicine. I bought a couple of cheap paperbacks for myself; nothing all that interesting, but reading material at least. We were having difficulty finding one of the magazines mom had requested, True Confessions, so we asked the pharmacist about it. He said, "oh yeah we have those, just ask for it up at the front counter." True Confessions was a popular magazine with women back in those days. It was a collection of short PG-13 romance stories; think Hallmark Channel. True Life Confessions, on the other hand, was a magazine tailored more toward, shall we say, male interests; think late-night Showtime. And that, my friends, is how on the 30th day of January, 1978, my father and I bought and delivered a porno magazine to my mother who was, to put it mildly, somewhat less than amused.
Eventually, the work crews got the roads plowed and the electricity back on. I was out of school for at least a week and remember how strange the first day back was, as it seemed like I had been away for a month. A couple of weeks later things had more or less returned to normal; school, home, TV, bed. On February 15th, we huddled around our TV and watched Leon Spinks' historic upset of Mohammed Ali. A few weeks after that, spring had sprung and the nasty winter of 1978 was in the rear-view mirror.
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