When she and Charlie Silva arrived at the shelter, Elaine was carrying a large cardboard box. She kept it with her everywhere she went. And she was on her way home from Canada.
There is a growing market for illegal copies of movie videos, music discs, and other copyrighted items. Most of the pirated merchandise comes across the Pacific and spreads east from California. It’s sold on the street and in bars for a quarter of the legitimate price. Recently some of the blackmarket material has been smuggled down from Canada.
Five dozen knockoffs of an Oscar-winning movie or a chart-topping music single would fit into a large cardboard box.
I’d been watching for a National Guard truck with a load of generators to be delivered to some dairy farms several miles out of town and had a vehicle standing by to show them the way. A young man named Jerry who used to be in my Scout troop would drive me. When the truck arrived, I hobbled out to the car.
I’d been indoors for a day and a half; I wasn’t prepared for what hit me as we drove through the dark and deserted town into the countryside.
Huge trees, their branches gone, standing like grotesque sentinels. Young birch and alders bent double, their top branches ice-locked in the ground. Frozen underbrush shattering like glass as branches fell from trees. The strong smell of pine and cedar in the air like an invisible, cloying fog.
The Guard truck followed closely as we drove around piles of debris, watching for downed power and phone wires. I wanted to go faster; I knew the people on the dairy farms needed those generators desperately.
Without power for the pumps, the cattle couldn’t be watered. Nor could they be milked on schedule as they should be. Without these elementary attentions the cows would sicken and die. The generators would save many animals, but the storm would take a terrible toll.
“Show me where they picked up that city couple,” I said to Jerry on our way back. “I’m just curious.”
Charlie Silva’s car was a late model blue Pontiac sedan. It was on a short lane that led to an old barn, and it was blocked by a large fallen oak tree. “Pull over, Jerry,” I said. “Take a look inside.”
Jerry climbed over the tree and circled the car. “Nothing,” he reported. “Doors locked, trunk locked. Nothing showing inside, not even a road map.”
He got back in the car. “That guy is sure in a hurry to get out of here,” Jerry commented. “He’s going around offering fifty bucks to anyone with a saw to cut up that tree so he can get his car out.”
On the way back I wondered why Silva had pulled off the main road in the first place, and on a lane that led only to an old barn.
By nightfall the phone company had patched a line into the Town Hall, and I used the phone to call a friend of mine at state police headquarters in Ray Brook. I had made a note of the license number of the Silva car, and I asked him to check it for me.
“You don’t think we got enough to do?” he growled. “This storm’s got us out straight, Hank.”
But he did check the number. The blue Pontiac wasn’t stolen. Neither was it registered to a Charles Silva of Garden City, Long Island.
I added the names of two old friends to my shelter roster, Courtney Smith and his wife Gloria. Limbs had blocked Court’s driveway, and he had run out of fuel trying to saw them up. A big tree had fallen across the roof of the kitchen. And with no electricity for the heat tapes, the water pipes in his house and barn were freezing.
“The least of my problems, Hank,” he said.
I knew what he meant. I helped them get settled and left them alone. They sat by themselves, talking quietly. The Smiths owned a hundred acres of maple trees; their livelihood was sugaring. They’d been counting on the syrup to send their two girls to college.
They had to watch helplessly as the weight of the ice destroyed tree after tree. Eight out of ten of their maples had been ruined, and the relentless storm continued through the night and the next three days.
My contact had said the blue Pontiac was owned by a Frank Gratto in Hempstead, Long Island. Hempstead is not far from Garden City. Casually I asked Elaine if she knew anybody named Frank Gratto.
“Sure,” she answered. “That’s Charlie’s uncle. He gave us this trip to Montreal. He wanted Charlie to bring his car back for him, so we flew up and Uncle Frank paid for the tickets.”
So Charlie was just doing a favor for an uncle who lived on Long Island but left his car in Montreal. An uncle who was suspected of racketeering and had three arrests for unlawful possession of a controlled substance.
Some people who had canned food and bottled water and firewood decided to ride out the storm at home. For a few it was an adventure, for others a tragedy.
In spite of the warnings, people used kerosene heaters in closed rooms; they put gasoline-powered generators in basements or on closed porches. Reports of carbon monoxide poisoning came from all over. The first signs of poisoning, headaches and nausea, were usually ignored until it was too late.
Ted Rosenbaum, another friend of mine, was in charge of our evacuation detail. He had a crew going from door to door, to make sure any people at home were safe and to deliver food supplies. A large room at the rear of the building was operations center. Long tables were covered with raingear, battery radios, ice scrapers. Cigarette smoke layered the high ceiling.
Ted had a table against a wall and a tax list he had scrounged from the clerk’s office. As I walked up, two men had just come in from outside, stamping the slush from their boots, shrugging out of their black raincoats.
“We hit every house on Grove Street,” one of them told Ted. “And Separator Street is clear except for that old man at the end by the river. Want us to try him again?”
Ted shook his head. “You guys get something to eat. There’s some mighty good stew today.” He pointed at his map. “Then circle through the Jersey section in the morning.” The men headed down the hall to the cafeteria. Ted looked at me. “That’s old Caleb McCullen down by the river. You know him, don’t you, Hank?”
“I know him. As stubborn as they come.”
“Lives there alone, doesn’t he?”
“Not quite alone,” I said.
Ted was tracing the river on his map.
“There’s an ice jam downstream here.” He pointed. “The river keeps on coming up, nobody will get in there tomorrow.” He looked up at me. “You want to take a ride?”
I had my cap in a back pocket. I put it on and picked up one of the raincoats. “Let’s go,” I said. I wagged my cane. “You drive.”
Ted had the keys to a four-wheel drive vehicle; we headed out of town toward the river. We passed a power company bucket truck and digger. The crew was installing a new service pole. I had heard that over a thousand utility poles were already down in the northern part of the county. Giant steel transmission towers had toppled over near the Canadian border.
Behind us we could hear chain saws snarling as we inched our way down Separator Street, named before the Civil War when the iron mines on Palmer Hill and the smelters by the river were working. The snap of limbs breaking and crashing on the underbrush sounded like small arms fire. Larger branches, weighted beyond endurance by the ice, broke away with an angry loud crack.
“Sounds like a mortar,” Ted said.
“Yeah.” I wondered where Ted had heard mortar fire. I’d have to ask him sometime.
The air was heavy with the scent of pine and cedar. The ground was thick with needles and twigs and small branches. I hope we don’t have a dry summer, I thought; this will be tinder for a heck of a fire.
Caleb McCullen lived in an old trailer on the bank of the river. To reach it we drove down a dirt lane that dropped down from the paved road. Ted stopped the car, and we looked at the river, already out of its bank and foaming whitely in the dim light.