Ice Storms

I put on my Stupid Idea Hat yesterday afternoon and decided, despite that all of Toronto was in the middle of a freezing rain storm, I really wanted a discount BBQ chicken from the Metro grocery store up at Victoria Park and Danforth Avenue. I mean, it was Tuesday after all.

So I adventured up from my humble Beaches shack, braving the cold drops while slipping and sliding along the sidewalk for an entire half hour, only to find my old reliable Metro grocery had no such chickens for sale, nor was there any hope of such sales in the future. That was a fun hour. Good times.

Ice storms can be visually beautiful, but also incredibly dangerous. I remember when I was a kid in the late 90s there was a terrible one in Quebec that pretty much shut down most of the province for a while, might've even been a national emergency or something like that (I'd research into it but that's not really what I'm aiming for here).

My only personal experience with any kind of ice storm was back in winter 2013 (I think). I was living on a quiet residential side street of East York at that time (East York is a large Toronto borough if you're not familiar with the city) and I remember waking up one Sunday morning to find my laptop on low battery power, despite being plugged in. It was once I went into the bathroom in complete darkness that I realized we had no electricity.

I asked my housemate at the time, who informed me a tree branch (there are some enormous old trees in this part of Toronto) had frozen and fallen onto and broken a power line, cutting out power for most of the immediate area. Much of the food I had in the fridge I could not cook without electricity or heat, so it was a definite pizza day. I ventured out, aiming for the Domino's Pizza near Jones and Danforth.

The scene that greeted me was entirely surreal: this street and these houses, these trees and roads I'd seen everyday for over a year at this point, all of it was shining under a layer of clear, imperfect ice. It was like somebody had painted my world in its finest details, then decided to draw an extra outline around every little thing. There was something haunting yet beautiful about it. A place genuinely frozen in time, unmoving and ungrowing, yet untouchable by anything else.

I went for my pizza, ate half of it on the way, and once I was a block from my house I was struck by a bizarre inclination to cross over to the other side of the street, even though I was on the side my home was on. So I followed this instinct, walked for a minute, then watched as a large frozen branch could take no more and fell hard onto the sidewalk, perhaps in a place I might've been walking at the time. Sometimes the voice in the back of your mind catches lightning in a frozen baseball mitt.