Fifty Degrees Below (42 page)

“Well, it’s pretty cold,” Frank said.

“True! But it’s not windy. Thank God for that. Because it’s not the cold, it’s the . . .”

Having toured Connecticut Avenue, Frank began a comprehensive hunt through Rock Creek Park, walking the Western Ridge Trail and venturing down every side trail. He was relieved to find that the park was basically empty. The deer were tucked into their brakes and hollows; he wondered whether these would be enough, this could be a major die-off. But you never knew. Snow was a tremendous insulator and windguard, and these deer had gone through winters before.

And the truth was, they could use some culling. It was the ferals he was really worried about.

Then he found three people, still huddled together in a wood-and-cardboard shelter, down by site 9. At first he thought they were dead; then they stirred. He called 911 and waited, getting colder and colder as he tried unsuccessfully to rouse them, until some firemen got there. He helped them get the three up to the road and the truck, two on stretchers; the one who had been in the middle had done a bit better.

He went back to look for more. Rock Creek itself was frozen to its bottom, of course. The whole park was quiet, the city beyond it unusually quiet too, except for the ongoing wail of sirens, criss-crossing like tortured coyotes or the gibbons with megaphones.

The firemen had said the power grid might go comprehensively when the demand for juice was so high. The power companies had instituted preemptive brownouts to keep from blowing the system. Fire trucks were some of the only vehicles that would still start reliably, because they were kept in heated garages. Battery heaters were crucial at temps like these, but of course no one had any.

“My van started this morning,” Frank had told them.

“You get one, usually, but don’t be sure it’ll happen again, they’re done for at these temps. It’s fifty below!”

“I know.”

Lucky no wind! they said.

Frank checked the hot boxes left out for the ferals. If there was a loss of power to these the result would be catastrophic. Every box was crowded with a menagerie of miserable animals, like little shipwrecked bits of Noah’s Ark, every single creature subdued and huddled into itself. The gibbons hung from the corners of the roof near the heating elements, their little faces frowning like Laurel and Hardy after a reversal.

Frank called in to Nancy and reported what he saw. Zoo staff were doing what they could to collect any creatures they could, but the holdouts were skittish and determined to stay out; if the zoo folks tried for them now they stood a very good chance of driving them away and killing them. Best to let them take to the shelters, and hope it would be enough.

“Is the power to the heaters on generator standby?”

“No way. Cross your fingers.”

He continued with his survey. The low sun turned everything blinding silver. By now the temperature had risen to about twenty below, which in combination with the midday sunlight made a huge difference in how it felt to walk around. It came back to his body’s memory how major distinctions could be made between cold and super-cold, so that eventually ten below became comfortable, because thirty below was so miserable; and ten above became shirtsleeve weather, while fifty below was always on the edge of sudden death.

The power went out west of Connecticut Avenue, and Frank went over there and helped for a while with a crew going door to door to make sure people were all right, occasionally carrying the hypothermic out to fire trucks and ambulances and off to shelters or hospitals. Eventually his hands got too cold to carry on. He had to retreat into a UDC coffee shop and drink a coffee with the other adventurers sardined into the place. Painful buzz of his fingers regaining their feeling, though it was nothing to the way his penis had felt. Then the coffee shop had to stop serving, as their pipes had frozen and their water supplies on hand were all used up. They stayed open just to provide shelter. The damage to pipes alone was sure to cost millions, someone said, and take weeks or months to fix. They might be in for a water crisis as bad as the one after the flood, when for several days potable water and functioning toilets had been very hard to find. People didn’t think about these kinds of things until they happened, and then it was like discovering yet another Achilles’ heel, because it had ruptured.

The sounds of sirens seemed to be converging on them. Frank went out and looked around, saw black smoke rising in a thick plume over the neighborhood between Connecticut and the park, just south of where his van was parked. He hustled over there, slapping his tingling hands together as he walked.

It looked as if squatters might have accidentally set an abandoned house on fire. Already the blaze was out of hand, several houses burning, a whole knot of trees, all roaring in pale flames. The radiant heat beat on Frank’s face. When the fire trucks arrived they found that the water had frozen in the fire hydrants. They had to work on that instead of the fire. A helicopter chattered in and dropped its load of chemicals, to no great effect as far as Frank could tell. It had to be dangerous to fly helicopters in this kind of cold; they did it in Antarctica, but those helos were specially prepped. No doubt the Antarctic guys at NSF were extremely busy right now, helping in any way they could. No lunch run today. Corps of Engineers likewise. It was essential they keep power flowing. If there was any kind of significant power outage throughout the city, many people would freeze.

Talking to some of the firemen around the hydrant, Frank learned that there were already as many as two dozen fires in the metro area. All emergency response people were out: firemen, police, paramedics, the power company repair crews; the National Guard had been called up, yes both of them. Everyone else was being urged to stay home. Nevertheless the number of people walking the streets increased as the day wore on, all of them bundled and ski-masked and walking out in the empty streets. It loooked as if bank robbers had pulled off a major revolution.

Another fire started in Georgetown, which then lost power, and it also had frozen water mains. Frank drove down there, as his van kept starting for him, and he served as a taxi for a couple of hours, shuttling people from frigid houses and apartments onto the Georgetown University campus, where generators were keeping most of the buildings warm. George Washington University Hospital was also working on generators, and for a while it was clear that taxiing people was the best thing Frank could do to help; but then the streets began to jam up with traffic, amazingly—it was still twenty below and yet stop-and-go had returned to Foggy Bottom. So he parked in Georgetown again and joined a group of volunteers going door-to-door in the outage area, making sure everyone was out who wanted to be out.

The residential streets of Georgetown were a surprise to Frank. He had never walked around, or even driven in, this part of town, and it was like being transported to some quaint and comfortable old quarter of a northern European town. Colorful, neat, handmade, human scale—the streets were like what Main Street in Disneyland had always hoped to suggest, much more real of course, but still, toylike. Like the village in a snow-filled paperweight. He would have to return and check it out under more normal circumstances.

The sky overhead was unlike that in any paperweight, dark with smoke that streamed in fat bands all across the sky. A huge population lived hidden in the forest around the city, and nearly every single fireplace must have had a blaze in it; and a certain percentage had gone wrong and burned down their houses and added their greater smokes to the chimney fires, so that now the sky was streaked with black, and flakes of ash drifted down, lighter than snowflakes. Frank’s nose kept him from smelling the smoke, but he could taste it as grit on his tongue, a little acrid. He wondered if he would ever be able to smell again.

A fire truck wailed down Wisconsin, and the firemen in it jumped out and ran a pump and hose line down to the Potomac. It took some awkward work with chainsaws to break through the ice covering the river, which was now a big white sheet from bank to bank. A crowd gathered to watch and cheer, their breath frosting over them in a small cloud. Sputter and roar of a big Honda generator powering up, downshift as the pump motor was engaged, a moment of suspense while nothing happened; then the flattened hose bulked like a snake swallowing a mouse, and water shot out of the big nozzle held by two firemen, who quickly secured it to a stand and aimed the white flow at the leading edge of their blaze. The crowd cheered again. Spray flying upward from the jet of water had time to freeze in the air, flocking the nearby rooftops with the kind of snow one saw at ski resorts. A tall black man grinned hugely at Frank: “They froze that fire.”

Late in the day Frank went back down to the Potomac to walk out on the ice. Scores of people had had the same idea. It had happened the same way in London two weeks before, and all over the world people had seen images of the grand festival the Londoners had spontaneously thrown, celebrating the freeze in the Elizabethan style. Now on the Potomac people were mostly standing around or skiing, playing football or soccer ad hoc versions of curling. One or two wore ice skates and glided through the crowd, but most were slipping around in boots or their ordinary shoes. A hotdog-cart man was busy selling out his entire stock. The ice on the river was usually white but here and there was as clear as glass, the moving black water visible below. It was freaky at first to walk on these clear sections, but even big groups and giant leaps into the air did not cause a shudder in the ice, which looked from the occasional hole chopped in it to be about two foot thick, maybe more.

When sunset slanted redly across the Potomac the light struck Frank like another vision out of Brueghel. One of his Flemish winter canal scenes, except most of the Washington, D.C., population was black. Out here on the river you could finally see that in a way that Northwest and Arlington never revealed. It was like Carnavale on ice, the celebrants improvising clothing that was warm enough to keep them out there, which then became costumes too. A giant steel drum band added to the Caribbean flavor. Snowfights and slip-and-slides, break dancing and curling that was more like bowling, touch football, tackle football, it all was happening out there between Virginia and the District, on this sudden new terrain. In the fading light the whole world took on a smoky red cast, the river ice both white and red, and the contrast between the snow and the dark faces finally diminished to the point where Frank could see people properly. It seemed to him to be an extraordinarily beautiful populace, every race and ethnicity on Earth represented—the many black faces vivid and handsome, cheerful to the point of euphoria, laughing as they took in the scene—the white folk flushed as red as the sunset snow, dressed like L.L. Bean or gypsies or Russians or anything they had at hand—all partying together on the frozen Potomac, until with the dark it got too cold to stay out any longer.

The fires burned all night and into the next day, but on the other hand, the temperatures never dropped lower than ten below. Some in the coffee shops next morning thought all the smoke had created a smudge pot effect, the ultimate urban heat-island insulator; but even out in the country the temperatures had not dropped as low as they had gotten the night before. The low had been a freak thing, an all-time record for the city, and even the
Post
the next morning had a headline like a London tabloid:
FIFTY DEGREES BELOW.

Though it never got that cold again in the days that followed, it always remained well below zero, keeping the city somewhat in crisis mode. First the great flood, now the great freeze, with widespread fires as well—what next? “There’s an excellent chance of drought next summer,” Kenzo cackled when Frank talked to him on the phone. “We could hit for the cycle. And it’s going to get windy tomorrow.”

NSF stayed closed, along with the rest of the federal government. Frank called Diane every morning, and once when he lamented the lost work time she said “Don’t you worry about that, I’m working Congress every day, I take them out until they look like they are frostbit, and every one of them will vote for what we ask next time. It couldn’t be better.”

So Frank would wish her good luck, and spend that day cruising up and down Connecticut, hiking into the park, and helping out wherever he could, mostly with FOG work. Repair a hot box, keep them supplied with food, help lift out a tranquilized camel; always keeping an eye out for Chessman or the bros. Down to Dupont Circle, up to Adams Morgan, crossing the frozen creekbed to get to Georgia Avenue, marveling at the stream’s white arabesques, the frolic architecture of ice and snow.

On the third night of the snap he ran into the bros, hunkered in a concrete embayment surrounding a Dupont Metro station grating. They had walled off the indentation from the sidewalk with refrigerator boxes, and cantilevered a roof of flattened boxes as well. The interior was even frosting up like an old refrigerator.

“Come on you guys,” Frank said. “You should get to one of the shelters, the wind is supposed to hit soon. This is serious.”

“It’s always been serious, Bleeder.”

“Hey who’s winning! Where’s that barrel of brandy?”

“The UDC gym is open as a shelter.”

“Fuck that.”

“This is warmer here.”

“Yeah yeah. Whatever.”

He went up into the UDC shelter himself, and spent an hour or two walking down the rows of cots, handing out paper cups of hot chocolate to the kids. The homeless or the heatless, it was hard to tell the difference in here. He ran across the knitting woman, sitting on her cot knitting away, and greeted her with pleasure. He sat and they talked for a while.

“Why won’t the guys come in?”

“They’re stubborn. What about you, have you come in?”

“Well, no. But I don’t need to.”

She smiled her gap-toothed smile. “You’re all the same.”

“Hey what about Chessman? Do you know what happened to him?”

“I don’t. He just stopped showing up. It don’t mean nothing. I think he probably moved.”