After two weeks below 0 F, I feel the wind bite through my gloves deep into the fingers, my bones are like icicles, and unless we shovel a foot of snow off the driveway, we won’t be able get out to buy food in the supermarket, or to work, or anywhere.
What keeps my wife and me alive? A machine. The compressor of the heat pump sits outside in the snow drifts and sub-zero temperatures, whirring away 24 hours a day, morning, noon and night
We’re fine, but only as long as the heat pump keeps working.
Outside, covered with a foot of snow, the compressor for the heat pump is whirling all day, all night. In the summer, it made strange noises and stopped working. The house became hot, humid and smelled foul. The fan stopped working. The air conditioning stopped working. But we could live with the heat and smell. It’s the cold that the killer. What do we do at -3 degrees?
Yes, we have a fireplace, and with three or four logs, it will burn beautifully for three hours and heat the living room. If the heat pump stops, we would need 20 or more logs to heat the living room for a day and a night. That would be over 100 logs for five days. This arctic cold from Canada was expected to for two weeks. Now they say it might be another two weeks. That’s a month of subzero weather.
We’ve cleared a path in the driveway and I’ve waded through the snow to get in and start my Toyota Corolla. When I was young, living in Connecticut and major snowstorms came through once and a while. Back then cars in winter wouldn’t always start. I had a Chevy Vega and even in 30 degree weather, I’d turn the key, the engine would rev, but it wouldn’t catch.
I’d pump the gas trying not to flood it with gas or wear out the battery. The engine might pop once and stall. I’d wait, pump the accelerator and turn the key again. Turn and pump, turn and pump, jiggle and turn, hoping to hear the roar of the engine coming to life.
Sometimes, nothing happened. I always carried a canister of starter fluid in the back, which I’d get and go around front, lift the hood, often without gloves, twist off the wing nut on the air filter, the steel nut biting into my frozen fingers. I’d spray this inflammable solvent into the carburetor, then get in the car and hope to hear the sudden explosion of the fluid and the engine roaring like a maniac, with me jiggling the accelerator to calm it down but also keep it going.
This worked, usually.
All these memories came back to me as I sat in the Corolla, the feel of freezing plastic coming through the fabric of my pants kust like 40 years ago. I put the key in the ignition and braced myself. This time, it started on the first twist with a strong and confident roar. Fuel injection had replaced carburetors. I could now drive to the supermarket.
Yesterday, it took two hours to shop. The aisles were packed with families, students, single grizzled men desperately preparing for what might be a long siege of weather, and we noticed the strange sight of some shelves empty. Now, this morning, the shelves were full, and stock clerks and delivery men were still in the aisles replacing all kinds of fresh, canned, boxed, wrapped and frozen food that dozens of trucks had brought to the store through the snowy highways at night. No one would starve.
Last summer, I took a trip to California over the summer, through Chicago O’Hare, and at the San Francisco Airport, the monorail stopped on the tracks for a few minutes. Everyone is on schedules. Everyone was annoyed. Every year, 47 million people fly in and out of SFO, all on schedules synchronized by the airlines, which are synchronized by computers.
The monorail runs automatically by machines. There is no driver, no one to ask. We hear a scratchy voice through the loudspeakers, a recorded voice informing us this delay is only temporary. We’ve learned to be patient with machines. We’re at their mercy. While I wait for the monorail to start, I counted how many different machines took me from Indiana to California. I lost count at 15. With nothing else to do, my mind begins to do the math: 70 million times 15. Is that over a billion moments of machine assistance?
The monorail started up with a lurch.
This time.
What had they fixed? Or was it some computer malfunction? Or Internet overload? No one told us what happened, and none of us knew.
Some years ago, we were coming back from a short vacation trip to Las Vegas, and we were crossing the Mojave Desert around noon, carrying two spare jugs of water as we were warned, and I could feel the waves of heat baking the metal skin of our car, and we watched the endless dunes of sand and cactus flow by, wondering how the early pioneers crossed such a forbidding desert.
In one rest area, a VW van had pulled over with a group of half a dozen young men without t-shirts were crowded around the back of the van that they had jacked a good couple feet off the ground. If the van had broken down in the middle of the Mojave, they were in serious trouble. We pulled over for a bathroom break, and I went over to the van.
“What’s going on?” I asked one guy standing in back, his hands on his hips, grease up to his elbows, sweating without t-shirt.
“Uh… we’re changing the engine…” he said, without looking up.
“You’re …what? Changing the engine?
“Yeah…”
“What happened?” I asked, incredulous.
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