A Coating of Nutmeg: The Great Snow Storm of 2011

Of all U.S. states, Connecticut is the only one without a proper identifier, as in, “Hawaiian,” “New Yorker” or “Californian.” There has never been such a creature as a “Connecticutter,” “Connecticutian” or “Connecticutite.”

The closest you get to a nickname for a resident of Connecticut is “Nutmegger,” a not very pleasant allusion to colonial times when sharp-dealing Connecticut Yankee peddlers would fatten their purses traveling up and down the Atlantic seaboard hawking plugs of hardwood as nutmeg, that rare and expensive spice. Having bought what she thought would be a dandy garnish for holiday egg nog, an irate 18th Century housewife would bring it home to grind what turned out to be nothing more than expensive sawdust.

Little of that Yankee capitalist swagger was in evidence during the last two weeks as Connecticut tried to recover from the most damaging snowstorm in New England history, a disaster equal to both the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and the 1991 Oakland hills fire. In Marin, emergency preparedness has become a major issue and the earlier this year. But Connecticut’s October blizzard snuck upon the state like a cat burglar in velvet sneakers and, like a nightmarish guest, stayed for far too long.

Not having the good sense to be born in Marin, I did have the good fortune to move out to Northern California after college to a place where people stand up to disasters, natural and otherwise, with a powerful understanding of the impermanence of life. It is a sensibility that enables Marin residents to ride out the floods and storms of life and then rebuild knowing that even when “The Big One” hits, life in Marin will not only go on, but will be rebuilt better, bigger and with more optimism than before.

It was hard to find that frame of mind in Connecticut in the wake of the Ice Storm of 2011. Part of the problem was that it had been less than a month since Hurricane Irene had hit the state and residents were all disastered-out, and blizzards never hit stolid old New England in October. But it was also that the Nor’easter named “Alfred” was what has come to be called “a perfect story.”

The snow was as heavy as snow can get without turning back to slush and the trees were simply not willing to shed their still-green leaves, giving the lead-like snow a platform on which to accumulate. The result was a million-plus trees bending further and further towards the ground until they snapped under the weight of their snow-covered leaves. The sound of cracking oak and maple limbs became the sound track for arboreal disaster.

Like Marinites who resist the need to trim redwoods and eucalyptus to avoid dry-season firestorms, Nutmeggers resist the need to trim their beloved trees to make way for electric lines often threaded around and sometimes through beloved hardwood stands. The result was that the storm’s damage was immense; Nearly a million power lines were downed in a 24-hour period, virtually turning off the lights across the state.

This is when the storm’s psychic damage began. The CEO of Connecticut Light & Power, Jeffrey Butler, is a 27-year veteran of PG&E who followed the California model, trying to run a utility on the cheap, increasing shareholder dividends while hoping nothing too horrible or expensive, happened.

For PG&E, the disaster was a man-made one that went under the name “Enron.” At Butler’s Connecticut Light & Power, it was a failure to pay, in a timely fashion, contractors from surrounding states who had donated crews during Hurricane Irene.

At first Connecticut took the precipitation in stride, marveling at the 30” of unprecedented October snow as the ice built up and tree limbs began to sound like an artillery barrage mixed with the hissing of live downed power lines. By the time the ice began to melt, nearly a million lines were affected, and few power-line crews in evidence.

Governor Dannel Malloy called out the National Guard and people began to wonder if the power would ever be restored or if a return to the 19th Century was inevitable. The audio landscape was increasingly dominated by the daytime ratcheting of chainsaws and nighttime hum of portable generators. By Alfred’s third day, every generator between Albany and Boston had been sold and nary an empty hotel room could be had for love or money. “Warming stations” began springing up in town libraries and high schools, as snow-shocked citizens gathered around working electrical outlets primarily to charge up their cell phones and computers, trading war stories about the lack of progress in cleaning up downed trees and the no-show status of Connecticut Light & Power.

As days turned into a week, it became increasingly clear how thin was the veneer of civilization. Fights broke out in line at gas stations with portable pumps and the jostling became epidemic at the battery counters at Radio Shacks and Targets. With power out at thousands of stoplights, local police set up four-way signs in the hope that drivers would revert to manual signaling.

Wisely, power was first restored to malls, restaurants and stores, where people could eat, shop and drink endless cups of coffee while they recharged their seemingly indispensable cellphones.

By day eight, hundreds of crews finally began filtering in from places as far away as South Carolina, Montreal and Canada, and the millions of people without power was whittled down. I left the disaster zone late last week, with hundreds of tree trimmers still on suburban streets and lanes helping remove the logs, brush and leaves that made front yards look like scenes from one of Monet’s Water Lilies.

Post-Alfred Connecticut was equally a place, as Joni Mitchell once sang, “old and cold and settled in its ways.” It was also a region traumatized by the loss of power, of millions of trees and a population shaken literally to its roots by the kind of revenge of Mother Nature that we Marinites largely take for granted, but which seems to have further weighed down a New England now unsteadily bracing for what could be the kind of long, cold, icy winter that the smarter of us moved to Marin County to avoid.