Remembering Beast from the East

This weekend, forecasts predict a return to the cold weather. Following a relatively mild winter so far,  many fear a return to the extreme cold akin to the arctic conditions experienced in early 2018.

Here, Finn MacGinty O’Neill currently on a writing internship with the Westmeath Examiner, recalls his time snowed in, in the wilds of north Westmeath when Storm Emma made landfall March 2.

There was a drift that cut our avenue in two, shaped like a coral reef or a tide. I remember taking it in, staring at it from different angles as the cold nipped at my fingers, a dry cold I didn’t recognise from the winter past, and thinking how I had no touchstone, no memory, for a snow this dire.

Before the Beast hit, my family thought we prepared adequately. My father was minding our nephew and niece up in Dublin, while my mother amd I kept the house warm. We stocked up on food and we expected to be snowed in a day and a night. 

We were wrong. We were snowed in a week straight. The first days began strangely with the disappearance of my glasses. I am blind as a bat without them, and for the life of me could not remember where I put them.

My mother assured me that, since we were trapped inside, they couldn’t be outside the house and thus would turn up eventually. For the duration, I wore my back-up pair.

Our water pipes did not burst, our heating didn’t die,  there was no rioting in my area! But whittling down these problems that leap to mind, one must keep in mind cabin fever.

I learnt cabin fever is not boredom - the internet and books could keep us entertained.

No, cabin fever is what you get when stepping outside freezes your skin and evokes Arctic wind, when you have to stay inside and stare at the same walls all day.

You can’t even do chores, as the heaviness of the weather saps your energy.

Conversation in the household dried up, even when I called my brother up in Dublin: he was snowed in too, what else was there to talk about?

After a week, I took the first opportunity of the snow settling for me to venture out to the shop.

My village was a ghost town, the road to the centre a white strip with flecks of brown.

However, the centre was a spiderweb of muddy snow and black tarmac, signs of vehicles.

Finding the shop closed, I approached a man shoveling snow who told me (bitterly) that the Mullingar road was shut, but the Castlepollard road was open.

My mother decided we had to get out.

Our plan: get to Castlepollard, re-stock on food, have a drink if the hotel’s open, but most importantly, leave the house.

We got in our car, prepared to set off, and got 10 seconds down the avenue before the coral snow blocked our path.

We got shovels out and dug, but as we dug we feared that this would be the first of many obstacles, and that we’d spend the day shovelling.

But with sweat expended, we dug ourselves out from the snow, and faced no further blockades on the way to Castlepollard.

Shoppers cleared the Tesco Express of the basics, bread, as well as the necessities, alcohol.

Reminds me of a Finnish joke: “In the summer, we fish and we drink. In the winter, we can’t fish.”

Meanwhile, in the hotel, a giddy sense of disaster united the patrons.

Where there wouldn’t be much conversation between tables at all, staff and customers talked to each other about the deep freeze while my mother and I enjoyed a long-deserved drink.

After that, the snow melted as the sun came back.

My dad returned from a hectic week entertaining small children trapped inside their house, and we never did find that pair of glasses, even if we turned the house upside down looking for them.

My friends from America and Eastern Europe cracked jokes about Ireland falling apart at what would be considered standard weather for them. 

Looking back, I can’t shake the feeling that if the end of the world happened, it would be a lot like that trapped-in week.