This little trip down memory lane was triggered by a conversation I was having with one of he wife’s friends today.
Back in 2008, when the wife and I were still just friends, she asked me to watch her house, and her four dogs, and her daughter’s three cats, for ten days while she, her first husband, her daughter, and her son-in-law went on a Alaskan cruise.
Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem, but at the time Hurricane Ike was forming in the Gulf Coast. He turned out to be a real bastard. The wife and family managed to get out on the last plane flight leaving the Houston airport before it shut down.
I had two dogs of my own so they had to come with me while I stayed at the wife’s house. Basically, once I got there, we hunkered down and waited for the hurricane to blow through town. It did, the next morning, around 2:00 AM. The power had gone out at this point, and all I had to listen to was a little portable AM radio I had with me. I was wide awake as the storm blew through town, sitting in the living room, surrounded by all the dogs. They slept through the maelstrom and had no problems with it. However, the next morning, around 2:30 AM, a thunderstorm moved through the area. I was trying to sleep, but the dogs were all up, freaking out over the thunder. “You slept through a hurricane last night! Why is this a problem?”
The morning after Hurricane Ike passed over, I discovered that there was a leak in the window in the front room of the house and there was water all over everything, including the piano. I ate my one bowl of cereal for the entire ten days that morning before all the food in the refrigerator started going bad. The wife had bought me lots of frozen food to survive on while they were in Alaska, all of which was rapidly going bad without any electricity in the house. I then got everything in the front room cleaned up.
I also discovered that part of the backyard fence blew down during the storm. This made taking dogs much more fun. Instead of being able to open the door and let the lot of them run out to go potty, or play, I had to take each one out on a leash, one at a time. You try taking a pack of dogs out one at a time under those conditions. The ones that didn’t get to go out howled and bounced and slammed against the door, over eager for it to be their turn. The cats were low maintenance. As long as they had food and water, and the dogs didn’t try to go upstairs to annoy them, they were fine.
We had very spotty telephone service. I had a cell phone but no way to charge it so within a day or two it was useless. The wife had one last landline but the phone was upstairs in the house. I’d go up each day and check it. Once or twice we had service. I tried calling the wife but she didn’t pick up. I left a message for her to let her know how things were going. I found out later they were on an excursion to go see a glacier at the time.
My house at the time, about ten miles away, had power, since it was on the same electrical grid as the local hospital. The problem was I couldn’t get to it for a few days because the highway was shut down. I thought about going back to my house to ride things out but I didn’t have enough room for all the animals to come with me. I did get up there I think on Day Three. I had a load of apples, peanut butter and bread and some bottled water. I took all that back to the wife’s house so I’d have something to eat. The dogs and cats had plenty of food so no worries about that. I think at one point a friend of mine and I went out foraging for food and found a Sonic Drive In open. We stopped in and got some food. Not great but edible. Any port in a storm, and all that. At one point one of the neighbors was going around the neighborhood. They had a generator so they had power in their house. They were good enough to offer me a glass of cold orange juice, or milk for my cereal, I don’t recall which.
Since I didn’t have anything else to do I spent a lot of time sitting on the neighborhood sign, reading books. I got through David Eddings’ The Elenium series doing that. It was kind funny because police cars were patrolling the neighborhood. They’d always drive by real slow as I was reading. What? They’ve never seen anyone read a book before?
Ultimately, it was ten days of this – isolation, not much in the way of food, no electricity, no water, no way to communicate with the world at large. The night before the wife and family returned, around 10:00 PM I think, the power came back on. Along with it, water and the ability to charge my cell phone. The wife came back the next day, without having to go through any of the duress I went through. We all made it through though, me and all the animals.
And yes, I got a T-shirt for all my efforts. On the front it said “I [then a list of all the animals] survived Hurricane Ike …” and the back said “… while you were in Alaska!”
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