The Halloween Blizzard of '91

Now that Minnesota is on the map, so to speak, I'm seeing various social media posts of patronizing Minnesotans taking it upon themselves to explain "The Halloween Blizzard of '91" to an internet that didn't ask. 

I understand the compulsion. For Gen X and elder Millennials, this apocalyptic storm is a cultural touchstone; a zeitgeist in and of itself. Kitschy shops and State Fair booths sell t-shirts that say, "I survived the Halloween Blizzard of '91" alongside other cultural tropes like, "I tried to ford the river but my oxen died" and "Whisky Business."

And it was a legit storm. It was a Category 5 Blizzard, caused in part by the infamous "Perfect Storm." Records were shattered. The state was shut down. Freeways, infrastructure, everything: frozen, quite literally, for days. Minnesota is made to withstand snow. We know how to handle it, drive in it, remove it, and laugh about it. "Ope, blizzard with 0 meters of visibility moving in? might be a few minutes late to work. Gotta help Janice next door plow out her driveway. Those dogs of hers need to do their business somewhere!" So the fact that the halloween blizzard absolutely neutered our hardy state is telling.

But all these stories are from people who lived in the Twin Cities, in the middle of the state, or Duluth up North-ish. My story is one from southern Minnesota. We got the same deadly temperatures, the same wrenching winds, and the same amount of precipitation. But ours came in the form of ICE. And let me tell you... this story only hasn't been made into a movie because Hollywood doesn't know about it.

I lived in very, very rural Minnesota. Trick-or-treating was a commute with Grandma's house as the hub. In that era, there was only one day to go out and collect candy, unlike today's week-long events, and so we ignored the weather reports and drove the 15 minutes into town. Each house gave me handfuls of candy because I was one of the only kids out. My nervous parents hurried me through the neighborhood, and then hustled me home, just as rain started freezing against the windshield. 

When the storm yielded, everything was encumbered with three inches of solid ice. The power failed. The heat failed. We had two kerosene heaters that we moved into the living room; they generated warmth and we used them to cook ramen noodles and grocery store brand mac and cheese from a box. Their proximity melted the finish on two decorative wooden pillars, and still today at my parents' house, you can see and feel drips in the varnish: a trophy of an icy victory.

About half a mile away, across a glazed and empty corn field, was the nearest paved road, and power lines ran alongside it. We stood at the windows and watched as they fell like dominos, one after another after another. We could hear the snapping of the wood and the cracking of the ice where they lay. My mom later told me that THAT was the moment she knew things wouldn't be normal for a long time.

The pipes had long frozen, so we didn't have running water. My parents, no strangers to rural living, filled old milk cartons and the bathtubs overnight, while I slept with a tummy full of candy, before the pipes succumbed. No running water meant no flushing toilets. Yet Minnesotan pragmatism wins! My dad went down to the pond where in the summer I paddled a flat-bottomed duck boat and harassed frogs, chopped a hole in the ice, and brought buckets of pond water for bathroom use. Do your business, fill the bowl with groundwater, flush. Water skeeters, waiting out the long winter in the relative warmth under the ice, made the trek in with the pond water, and for weeks our toilets were filled with black bugs cheerfully zipping along the water's surface.

Here's the part that should be made into a movie. The closest town— where I went to school, where we shopped, where I trick-or-treated, etc— had also lost power because the power plant went offline. The ice damaged it nearly beyond repair. It looked dire. We thought the town would be without power indefinitely.

But then someone remembered the decommissioned power plant.

It had been offline for YEARS. Decades! In the '70's the new power plant had been built and so the old one was unhooked and there it sat. 

Minnesota is sticky; people tend to find a place and stay put. Or if they leave, they return. And so that's how the city was able to find a couple of retired, elderly men who had worked at the old power plant decades earlier. Those men remembered the systems, remembered how to bring it online, and because it was effectively abandoned rather than torn down, were able to use it to restore power to the town. The town came back to life on the backs of a long-decommissioned piece of infrastructure that no one had gotten around to removing, and a group of old union guys.

How is this not a movie starring Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine?

I was five years old at the time. I was shielded from a number of horrors. While the nearby town's power was restored thanks to the heroics of a few retired workers, in rural Minnesota we didn't have utilities for over a week due to the toppled lines. The roads were cleared after about three days, and so many rural folks headed to town for hotels. Looters were quick to take advantage of the situation, so we stayed put in our Fortress of Solitude. My sister was 15, and this was the era of Big Bangs, and so no electricity meant no hair dryers. True suffering! The local AM radio station was asking listeners to call in with their survival tips. We were tuned in via a battery-powered radio in the kitchen when we all realized my father was mysteriously absent. This realization hit just as we heard his voice crackling from the radio, explaining how flushing toilets was easy if you had access to an axe and a standing body of water. He ended his PSA with a targeted insult at those who hadn't supported his small business in the past. I was delighted, "daddy is on the radio!" My mom and sister still shrivel in embarrassment thinking about it.

When Governor Walz talks about the hardiness of Minnesotans, our pragmatism, grit, and resilience, this is it. This is normal. This is Minnesota. Yes it may come with water bugs decorating your toilets, but that's just part of the adventure. We love it here, even though 30 years later we still clutch our Diet Mountain Dew over a slightly singed hotdish, peer out the window at the darkening sky and say, "Oh jeez, looks like snow's comin'. I'd better run to Hy-Vee and get some milk, eggs, and butter. Betcha it's not half as bad as dat Halloween Blizzard of '91, tho."