Expecting the unexpected may be sage advice, but it doesn’t get you through it. We had settled into our normal Christmas routine of preparing for a dinner at a friend’s house, but Mother Nature had other plans. For the whole lead up to that festive day, snow and ice made for a startling change to our expectations.

When our friends and relatives who live Stateside ask if we get snow where we are in Ireland, we tell them that we get a dusting, or maybe an inch, and then it’s typically gone by noon. That was true, but is now no longer the case. The snow stayed the whole week through, here on the higher elevations – a similarity our friends also shared. They were housebound and so were we. So we made plans to have a delayed Christmas dinner on New Year’s Day.

Well, I’ve heard the expression over here that God laughs when people make plans, and He must have had a right good chuckle when we got hit with the old one, two punch – more snow and then no water! How a country with massive, record-setting flooding just the month before can end up so dry the following month is just unbelievable. But the answer is two-fold, frozen or burst pipes and an aging infrastructure. So New Year’s Day came and went without a thaw, and without a drop of water.

We were lucky we had heat. We also had a water source in the form of a neighbor’s massive rainwater holding tank. Armed with old feed buckets, I made the twice daily, nearby trek to the water tank and returned with enough water to flush the toilet and boil up water to wash the mounting dishes. On the rare occasions when I was able to drive out our gate and brave the untreated roads, I returned with enough drinking water and food to get us through several more days.

After nine days without running water, it returned at last – but for just one day. By now we were into another record-breaking scenario, this time a sustained freeze the likes of which had not been seen in fifty years, and the pipes were indeed frozen. Even the rainwater tank was freezing over. The first time I broke through the ice, using only a hammer, it was 2.5 inches thick! A frozen rainwater tank can actually crack with that kind of icing, and that would be really disastrous. That neighbor dropped off a sledgehammer and I volunteered to jump up onto the sides and break the ice daily (actually, twice a day), being very careful not to slip and fall in during the process (it’s over six feet deep).

It’s really quite amazing just how tenuous our connection with the 21st century is. We heated water to wash our hair and take a sponge bath. We may as well have put a zinc tub in the kitchen and had a bath the old-fashioned way. Thank goodness the electricity only went out for part of one day. That would have been really desperate – no heat and no internet! But good old ESB came through, as they always do.

Not all of Ireland was subject to the deep freeze and the accompanying ice and snow. For most of the time, I could look longingly down into the green valley below. At other times, the fog in the low-lying areas made us feel totally cut off.

But there is some comradeship in the midst of adversity. Neighbors on both sides, each of whom live a half a mile away and are on the main road, rang us up to check that we were okay and offered to make a run to the shops for anything at all that we might need. That was really touching and much appreciated.

After nearly nine years here, we’re coming to learn something new. It was the beauty of the landscape that first drew us to Ireland, but it’s the warmth of the people we’ve gotten to know here that made us want to stay.

P.S. The temperature stayed above freezing today and there is a dribble coming out of the outside tap. Let’s hope it holds!

© Gary Hetzler 2010

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