A few minutes ago, I stepped outside just long enough to check the weather. Almost immediately, my right foot slid down the driveway, toward the street, while my left foot stayed safe and sane upon the walk. Everything in between just sort of stretched to its maximum and dangled there on the ice.

It was really quite impressive.

So, all the world is made of ice, and unless you have a million gallons of Riunite (that’s nice) to pour over it, the only thing left to do is bitch, moan and talk about 1998.

Ah, 1998, a year that began so ice-locked and miserable, I’m not even tempted to exaggerate about the ordeal 16 years after the fact.

It was a glorious, glistening time, when it was perfectly OK to go to work in a cloud of your own personal stench, like Pigpen in the old comics.

“Whoo!” a colleague would say, scrunching his nose and fanning himself. “Still no hot water at your place?”

“My hot water is fine. Why do you ask?”

In January 1998, nobody had to mumble through forced conversations, because we were all in the same reeking boat and there was only one thing to talk about.

The power was out, the generators were cranking, the drama was high. Who was going to talk about football or the latest episode of “Friends” when we were out of soap, underwear and toilet paper? How could we pretend to have normal lives when our mothers-in-law had moved in with us, her nine cats and four parakeets in tow?

On the streets, only the big power company trucks were moving, lumbering like mythical beasts that might one day bring light to the world. On the sidewalks, we hobbled slowly along, like old, aching men. We took each step with great care, arms pinwheeling at our sides like cartoon tightrope walkers.

Every day, people fell and cracked their skulls. Others succumbed to carbon monoxide. There were fires and car crashes and ice-coated tree limbs crashing through roofs.

At the newspaper, the phones rang constantly with tales of kindness and greed in equal parts. A nice man comes to the aid of a shivering woman and her many kids. Kindness. Thieves ransacks a dozen abandoned homes along a darkened street. Greed.

We didn’t write about these things with any sort of glee, because we were in the thick of it, too. There was this one copy editor, from Minot, who was without power for pretty much all of January. His name was Tim and by the end of it, he had been reduced to a grunting, hair-covered caveman.

“Unk!”

“What do you mean there’s a problem with my syntax? My syntax is fine.”

“Unk!”

“OK, OK. I’ll fix it. Don’t hit me with your club.”

At night, you could stand outside and all you’d hear were the creaks, cracks and groans of tree limbs succumbing to their eternal foe, winter. Entire trees crashed down upon back roads and there they remained for days, dead and gleaming, until an army of recovery crews came to chop them up.

At home, we lived in the glow of candles, eating cold food out of cans. If, that is, if we were smart enough to have picked up a mechanical can opener somewhere along the line. In the morning, we crawled out from beneath piles of blankets 12 feet high and sniffed our unwashed clothes before putting them on.

At least that’s what I heard.

We lived like savages through it all, but the human spirit triumphed and blah blah blah. Mostly, we were stinky and tired and cold, but then a hero came from Washington and did something so profoundly stupid, our laughter and derision warmed our icy bones.

No line is safe to touch, dimwit. Ever.

Most of us survived the cold, wet horror of 1998 and I suspect we’ll survive this latest round of ice, as well. I mean, heck, it could be worse. It’s not like it came around a major holiday.

Now, if you’ll pardon me, I have to retrieve my right foot from the street. Not to mention the various parts of me that followed after.

Is Staff Writer Mark LaFlamme’s syntax slipping? Email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.

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