Home unexpected

“Well, that’s that. Sheriff just radioed to say that the pass is closed.” My boss Martha pounded globs of wet, sticky snow off of her boots on the doorframe.

“I don’t know how you all manage this weather every year,” I stated from behind the counter, as far away from the frigid blast of wind entering our little camp store. It was my first work camping position, part of my husband's and my final foray into non-traditional living before unwillingly settling back into the nine-to-five grind. 

We saved up enough to travel full-time in a little 25 foot long motorhome, and had been up and down both coasts, across the country east to west twice, and now were settled at a cozy little campground at the north end of New Mexico. 

“Nah, it’s not every year hon. At least not this bad. The Raton pass only closes a few times a winter, and most of the time it’s just a precaution. Sheriff says tonight it’ll get ugly though. We should go ‘round, talk to those who are due to leave today, make sure they know to stay put for one more night. We can offer a free night to anyone decides to stay. No one’s coming in today, anyways, and we have a few spots to spare.” 

Cringing inside, I prepared to put my coat and boots on. I was such a wuss when it came to cold temperatures, but my husband Allen said he missed the seasons’ change when we were home in the desert of west Texas. I was willing to give winter a chance, and we would still be close enough to go home if I couldn’t stand it, so we took this job two months ago with a six month contract to give it a trial run. “Who knows?” he said, “maybe they’ll take us on full-time and we won’t have to go back to an office job ever again?” While the possibility appealed to me in theory, living in less than 150 square feet challenged me in ways I’d never expected.

I pulled on a heavy fleece sweatshirt over my thermal top, grabbed my parka from the coat rack and slung it on, and stuffed my twice-stockinged feet into new, one size too-large winter boots while Martha did the reverse, hustling behind the counter to answer the reservation phone. I zipped up and overheard her explain to the caller that no, we can’t take any more for tonight since haven’t you heard there’s a storm coming? And would they rather come on up next week for some skiing and sledding? My hood covered my ears and I couldn’t make out any more as I braced myself for opening the door.

No one ever told me that it was possible for the snot in your nose to freeze, nor that it would be so painful. My eyes watered as I closed the door soundly behind me, then my vision fogged as those tears began to crystallize. I blinked hard and my vision cleared, but the jabbing pokes in my nose made me tear up again.

Once I could see and breathe again, I made my overly large feet step gingerly around slushy spots on the campground’s gravel road. Icy wind swirled around me, unable to pick a single direction, and each time it hit me in the face my breath was taken away. When I spotted Allen, I waved him over from his work on an unused site’s power pedestal. He grinned at my overstuffed appearance, and despite my discomfort I grinned right back. 

“Cold enough for ya?” he called when he was close enough. He was in a flannel shirt, jeans, and boots, with no outer covering or gloves or anything, and he looked like he was having the greatest day.

“Yeah, thi-” I tried to respond, then a gust of wind hollowed me out and I coughed at the dry itch it caused in my chest. 

“Poor hon. What are you doing out here? I’ve got the electrical checks handled myself.” Allen made me shiver with a cold kiss to the cheek.

“Martha got word that the blizzard will shut down the pass. She wants us to notify everyone leaving today that they are welcome to stay.” I coughed one more time. “They should stay, really. Tonight is free. And we should make sure everyone else knows the situation too, see if anyone needs propane or firewood or anything.” I added the last myself, in case the power went out.

Allen wiped his hands on his jeans, and agreed, “Sounds like a plan. You get evens, and I’ll get the odds?” I didn’t trust my voice to work, so I nodded and stomped the first few steps toward the first even site number since my toes were numb. From cold or sock constriction, I wasn’t sure.

With locating each tenant, chatting with them about the weather, convincing two of them to stay one more night on our dime, and sending one trailer over to the propane tank to get refilled, my task took a good ninety minutes. Impressive considering there were only twenty or so spots on the even side. I spotted Allen lagging behind me, so I took over two of the odd-side guests as well. We met up, compared notes, then headed into the office to thaw out. Even his nose was red from cold, and it was barely one in the afternoon.

While updating the reservation software with the guests who were staying an extra night, I manned the register as well and sold a few packets of hot cocoa, some chicken noodle soup, and a cheap blanket that would be used for Mrs. Gullickson’s poodle Chance. “He’s such a delicate pooch,” she explained, and I gave her a locally-made biscuit from behind the counter for him.

Our shift normally ended mid-afternoon during the week, but as Allen and I were gathering our things Martha’s husband Mack came hustling over from the garden shed, waving one hand to get our attention. Pausing on the porch, Allen held the door for an entering customer, then turned as Mack huffed up to us. 

“Allen! I wanted to ask you and your wife if you’d be willing to stay on-call this evening? Martha had to go to town, check on her sister before the storm, and now she’s stuck there since the county shut down all roads outta town!” He wheezed and took off his trucker cap, slapping it against his knee and returning it to cover the last wisps of grey hair there. “Like she don’t know how to handle herself in some snow!” he managed once he caught his breath.

I looked up at the tree line and saw a solid white veil of fat snowflakes heading right towards us, and wished for a quiet night in our motorhome, furnace running, hot cocoa spiked with bourbon in my mug, but if duty called, duty called.

“Sure thing, Mack. We’ll be on hand to help with any incidents,” Allen gave his boss a firm handshake to seal the deal, took a walky-talky with his left hand, and we made our goodbyes to Mack. Hopefully for the day, I pushed the wish into the ether with my thoughts, then held Allen’s hand as we trudged to our spot at the tail end of the campground.

We had barely thawed out with soup and sandwiches for lunch when the walky-talky gave a deafening BOOP! Allen grabbed at the offending object and twisted the volume knob down just in time to hear Mack shout into his end, “Hey, yah, Allen? Ya hear me ok? Over.”

Allen smiled at me, responding, “Yeah, Mack, we hear you loud and clear, over.”

“Alrighty man, I’ve got a situation out here. I’m gonna need you and the wife to come back out. Over.”

I was already pulling my head through another sweater and handed Allen his hat and gloves from the storage cabinet above my head. He nodded his thanks and confirmed with Mack, “On our way. Over and out.”

“You’re pretty cute when you talk trucker,” I told him cheekily as we crowded onto the doormat to don our boots. Just before pulling the handle to open the door, he gave me a peck on the forehead.

The situation turned out to be a falling tree branch that snagged on the power line feeding the campground. Mack was staring up at it in dismay, hat in hand, when we walked up. “So, we’ve got some problems here,” he started needlessly. “One: snow’s coming down thick and fast and weighing on that branch. Two: sheriff said no one’s coming up from town until at least tomorrow afternoon. And three: our basket crane is in town getting its hydraulics looked at, so we have nothing to get up there with.” Mack transferred his hat back onto his nearly bald pate.

We stood there and pondered the situation, gazing at a snow-frosted pine tree branch thirty feet off the ground that was slowly weighing down our power supply. Snowflakes kept getting caught on my eyelashes, and a few managed to float their way down the back of my coat to gather in a wet spot just below my neckline, so I suggested that the three of us head into the office to further discuss the predicament.

Made grumpy by a curtailed meal, not to mention the stuffy feeling of being packed into four layers of clothes, I wanted to get this solved as soon as possible so as to return to my heated motorhome, a cup of cocoa, and a good book. “So, worse comes to worse, what do we do if that power line snaps and we have no electricity?” I shuddered as melted snow trickled down my back.

Mack looked at Allen as he answered, “Well, we’ve got a pair of generators for the sites, and a smaller one for the office building, but we oughta ask those who can run their own generators to get them primed. I already saw to the ones for the campground,” he stated as if it was an accomplishment. 

My husband looked at me with pity and offered to go site to site and apprise our guests of the situation while I sat tight in the office. I choked on gratitude and only managed a hug before he set off into the elements.

Left alone with Mack puttering around in the back of the office where the circuit board and gas shutoff were, I decided to make myself useful and brew up a big vat of coffee. Once the banquet-style huge percolator got going, the aroma reached Mack and he turned to me and gave me a nod. I’ll take what I can get, my positive side reassured me. I busied myself further by straightening up the store inventory, replacing the soups and hot beverages that had sold, and swiping a damp mop over our wet boot tracks. Since those small tasks served to warm me up, I decided to do a full mopping of the store even though it wasn’t due for one until tomorrow.

Mack was busy calling up his friends and family to find a replacement piece of machinery for our purposes. I toiled to the sounds of the Jimmy Buffet station on the computer, mindlessly swabbing side to side, up and down the small aisles of the store, when the ominous CRACK of a pine tree splitting made us both pause and turn our heads towards it. Allen came shuffling at high speed through the door and announced, “Damn branch fell. It’s still up there, but the power line looks like…”

And right then we heard SNAP! and ZAP! and a few clumps and sizzles while everything electrical in the office wound down. We three waited until the silence was complete, then made our wordless way outside to survey the damage. 

In less than an hour since I was outside, the landscape had transformed from a charming dusting of frost to a half foot of icing on anything standing still. Each snowflake made an individual sound, the slightest muffled impact with thousands of its predecessors. I couldn’t see past our motorhome less than fifty yards away for all the fat, heavy snowflakes in the air.

Half a dozen of our guests ventured to the ends of their sites to witness the event, with several more creating foggy shapes on their windows, and we waved at them to acknowledge that we’ve seen it too. A stray breeze wafted a bit of ozone stench at me and again froze my nasal mucosa. Mack wordlessly trudged out towards the driveway, perilously close to the still-sparking end of the power line, and opened a metal box on the light pole there. His shoulders bunched as he hauled on a lever, then once it turned the sparking stopped. 

Allen went to join him while I excused my flight into the building by telling myself that someone should stay by the phone and CB radio. Apparently though, not much else could be done because the men followed a minute afterward and both went for a styrofoam cup of coffee. “Drink it while it’s hot,” I told them.

“The generator should be enough to keep the heater and lights going, but everything else should be shut off,” Allen informed me of what Mack told him outside. Complying wordlessly, I set about turning off the computer, printer, soda machine, and anything else that I could unplug. Mack threw back the rest of his coffee then trudged out the door yet again to start up the generator. Fluorescent lights flickered on, faded, then brightened again, and the wall heaters buzzed to life. 

“Alright, y’all should be comfortable enough in here for the evening. I’ll relieve you at midnight,” Mack informed us from the open door, then turned and departed without another word. I looked askance at Allen, and he shrugged, obviously not having been informed of this added duty. I shrugged as well and set out to find a couple of chairs we could put near a heater to at least thaw out our feet.

One closet in the back was familiar to me, containing cleaning products, mops, brooms, and bathroom essentials. The next one further down the hallway I’d been into once or twice: stuffed shelves and filing cabinets, dot matrix printer paper from the 80’s, and boxes of other miscellaneous office material. Not finding any chairs, I tried the knob on the last door. It creaked as it turned, and a wave of dust rode the air current made by the opening door. I peeked inside, and disbelieving what I saw I called to my husband, “Hey hon, could you come over here? With a flashlight, if you have one?”

His booted steps came toward me hurriedly, since I typically used that tone of voice for especially large spiders, and then his flashlight illuminated the contents of door number three. Our eyes met and we grinned at one another.

A walk-in closet revealed to us dozens of costumes, from classic green aliens to Star Trek uniforms, a Mack-sized Cheshire cat onesie next to an Alice in Wonderland dress, Princess Leia’s slave outfit which I honestly tried to envision Martha in and failed. 

And displayed on the inside of the door on a corkboard were pinned hundreds of admission tickets from comic-con events all over the country. “Atlanta, Las Vegas… and ooh!! There’s one from San Diego!” I cooed over the collection, green with envy that our staid campground bosses had been cosplayers for almost two decades. In that moment, I felt that we had found our new home.