Seven quilts in a memorable snowstorm

As you read this, we have just gotten past an ice storm, a snowstorm, and a two-week stretch of bitterly cold temperatures.

Weather! It seems to be more and more the topic of conversation in the past couple of years. The remnants of Helene are still affecting many folks.

Some of you, I’m sure, recall the Blizzard of ’93. That storm included particularly notable snowfall totals such as 56 inches at Mount LeConte and 50 inches at Mount Mitchell with 14-foot drifts.

Boone recorded well over 30” of snow and 24 hours of 11-degree temperatures.

I was living in Charlotte that fateful weekend in 1993. As a matter of fact, I happened to have been performing in Savannah, and my only recollection of that event was that it was somewhat windy with a rather cold rain down there.

It turned out that Charlotte only got 3 inches of snow and it was all gone by the time I got home on Sunday. But this story is not about me, however, it does involve that storm and how it affected some friends of ours.

Their names are David Single and Susie Winters. Winters, what a fitting name for this tale.

Susie and David are artists; two of my very favorite artists. David is a nationally known sculptor, and Susie is a multimedia artist who works mostly in paint and pastels as well as being a retired professor of art at Appalachian State University.

They are organic farmers and live in Deep Gap just east of Boone in an old farmhouse built in the late 1800s. They have two daughters, now long grown and gone with children of their own. But in March of 1993 the girls were in grammar school.

David and Susie are what might be described as free thinkers, or perhaps bohemian, conservationists, environmentalists, compassionate although I’m sure that they would have been called hippies by many folks at one time. I pretty much fit that same mold myself.

The house was and still is heated with a wood stove. They had heard the weather forecasts about the threat of a late winter snow and were prepared. The back porch was piled high with firewood and the cupboards were stocked. Oil lamps were filled and wicks trimmed and ready if the power lines should come down. The forecast was for snow. And snow it did.

Their house sits just below what is now known as Old Highway 441 at a point where the highway runs parallel to the Blue Ridge Parkway. The snow had been falling heavily in big flakes all afternoon and traffic was getting sparse on the roadway above as darkness began to fall. The wind howled. Then the power lines came down from the overloaded trees falling. Traffic had stopped passing.

David, Susie and the girls fed the wood stove and lit the oil lamps. Then out in the darkness, mixed in with the howling of the wind, came the whirring of tires spinning hopelessly up on the road. They looked out the window and saw the lights of a car going nowhere.

There was but one thing to do, go bring whoever was in that vehicle to the house before they froze to death in the storm. David quickly pulled on his boots, two sweaters, his heavy coat, a wool toboggan, wrapped a thick scarf around his face and grabbed his Coleman lantern.

He waded drifts 3-feet deep up the gravel drive as the three gals watched from the living room window. It was snowing so hard that the lantern light faded from sight before David had gone halfway up the hill.

After what seemed an eternity, there came David, the lantern in one hand and the hand of a man in the other. In that man’s other hand was in the hand of another and in that man’s hand was in the hand of another. They formed a chain of four half frozen pilgrims trudging through waist deep snow. That caravan came stomping onto the porch as Susie opened the front door and ushered them inside.

Steaming mugs of hot coffee and thick slices of toasted homemade bread with melted cheddar cheese was dispensed as David and the three strangers huddled around the woodstove. The three newcomers all were dressed alike in Watauga County deputy sheriff’s uniforms.

They were on their way home from Raleigh where they had attended some sort of training seminar and had underestimated conditions.

Talk about two groups of people who seemingly had nothing in common other than the fact that they wound up in a situation solely dictated by the weather and fate.

Once the four snowmen had thawed out enough to relax a bit seven kitchen chairs were brought into the living room and seven quilts were wrapped around seven sets of shoulders.

Introductions came first. Hot cocoa and freshly baked hunks of pound cake were passed around and then the stories began. Stories of the history of the old house and stories of past snows and sleds. Stories of families and jobs and school plays and bicycle wrecks and grandfathers. And a guitar was passed around, and songs were sung about Norwegian woods and Davy Crocket and itsy-bitsy spiders.

By the third day those three deputies were able to resume their journey home to their families. But each of those seven storm survivors came away with a gift, the gift of knowing that we are all just folks. And that our stories are all pretty much the same.

Thirty-three years later just David and Susie live in that old house below Old North Carolina State Highway 441. The two girls have families of their own now. And the three deputies are long retired. But those seven survivors of the Blizzard of 1993 still keep in touch.

See, that’s the power of stories.