The Chevy dealership downtown loaned the police department some of its four-wheel-drive vehicles for emergency personnel to get around. If you were lucky (or unlucky) enough to be working downtown on the emergency response, you might rate a lift home. Once or twice a day they would get Pete home to check on his family and get a change of clothes, a process that involved dropping him off at the corner of his block and calling his wife to tell her to expect him as he trudged up the unplowed street in nearly chest-deep snow. Almost an hour later, he would make it to the door of his house, panting, five doors down from where he had been dropped.
City resources were not enough, so Pete arranged to contract with every individual he could find who owned a pickup truck with a plow. By Saturday, the snow had abated, but the stress level was mounting as people began to run out of food and supplies at home. Main roads were beginning to clear, but much of the city remained buried. From a National Guard helicopter, Pete saw how many houses were covered up to the windows. On the campus of Notre Dame, students were jumping out of third-story windows with glee, and daring each other to try it from higher.
People who really needed to be somewhere got creative. An Israeli dignitary who had been stuck in town for far too long was transported by snowmobile to the LaPorte County line, there to be conveyed, somehow, to Chicago and on to Tel Aviv. When Pete finally made it to Martin’s Super Market, which had a skeleton crew selling whatever perishables they had left, he passed half a dozen horses tied up in the parking lot.
Pete wasn’t the only one sleeping at work. Charlie Spiher, the director of the Mar-Main Pharmacy downtown, knew that people would need him, snow or not, and found a way to keep the pharmacy operating as everything around him shut down. He couldn’t let people go without heart medication or dialysis supplies. A few days into the emergency, he realized he had run out of what had suddenly become his most popular item: birth-control pills. I can’t find statistics to prove it, but locals speak of the hospital resorting to placing maternity beds in the hallway to accommodate an autumn baby boom, nine months after the storm.
As normalcy reasserted itself in the weeks to follow, a new problem arose: where to actually put all the snow. Around here, it may stay below freezing for weeks, so the snow doesn’t just melt. That winter’s snowfall came to 136 inches, millions of cubic yards of snow that had to find someplace to go. It was forbidden for environmental reasons to push it into the river (which moves so quickly that it never fully freezes over, even on subzero days). Downtown, a stalled development project (now a bustling hotel and office building) had led to a semi-permanent giant hole taking up a city block, known to locals as the Hole. This turned out to be the simplest place for the whole downtown’s-worth of snow to be dumped. A radio station hosted a contest to see who could guess when the last of the snow would be gone; the winner guessed a date in May.
FOR MY NEWLY ARRIVED PARENTS-TO-BE, these blizzard stories must have really been something. They had come from El Paso, Texas, where they had lived and commuted to work at New Mexico State University in nearby Las Cruces. This was high desert at the foot of the Organ Mountains, and snowflakes were rare and short-lived. The daughter of an Army officer who retired at Fort Bliss in El Paso, my mother had attended high school in a sun-washed building less than two miles from the border with Juárez in Chihuahua State, Mexico. No river valley could be more different from South Bend’s than that of the Rio Grande as it shunts through El Paso in the concrete casing that keeps its banks from shifting—a river forbidden to meander like normal rivers, because it is not just a waterway but also an international border. Mom had lived in Indiana before, as a girl in Scott County, but that was on the other end, near Kentucky, so far south of here it might as well have been a different state.
For my father, who had emigrated from the island nation of Malta, the snow would have been even more exotic. They say the Alaskan Inuit natives have over fifty different words for snow, because they experience it so often and in so many different forms. The Maltese have none. When he calls his sisters back on the island on a winter Sunday to trade family updates, he’ll use the word “sil?,” which means ice. So if this newly naturalized Mediterranean immigrant had anything in common with his wife from Scott County, Indiana, by way of El Paso, it was that neither of them was a child of snow country.
Yet, like the South Benders they were to become, they quickly learned to shovel snow. They taught themselves how to shift and brake differently when driving on snow, and adopted the cultural norm of talking with enthusiasm about memorable snows, even ones before their time, in an ever-escalating cascade of superlatives. Thus, when we celebrate my birthday each passing year, their story of that night in January of 1982 seems to grow in meteorological ferocity, the temperature further and further below zero and the snow cover ever higher above eye level, to the point that if you take them literally when they tell the story of the night I was born, it is an utter miracle that I made it out of the hospital—or indeed that anyone survived at all.
But somehow, with help from Maria Concetta Portelli Buttigieg, my weather-shocked Maltese grandmother, who made her first and only trip to America for the occasion along with my astonished young aunt Myriam, Mom and Dad successfully delivered me to their small two-story house on College Street on the northwest side of South Bend.
TO BE BORN IN 1982 is to be just old enough to remember the Soviet Union, and to have its fall be the first seismic geopolitical event of your lifetime. I remember the kid who dominated second-grade show-and-tell with a little chunk of the Berlin Wall, gray and rough on one side but smooth and painted on the other, a trophy from his father’s business trip to Europe. And there was Ms. Martin repeatedly explaining to us why our maps and globes, with “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” spread in impossibly stretched letters across the Siberian tundra, were now obsolete.
Coming into the world in the early 1980s puts you in that senior segment of the millennial generation that still remembers life before the smartphone. Today I couldn’t tell you the number of the phone on my own desk, but I still know my friend Joe’s number from sixth grade because I would punch it daily after school on a phone we had not yet learned to call a “landline.” If I dial that number even today, one of his parents will still pick up.
I’m young enough that I don’t always use a TV set to watch television, but old enough that you might catch me using the phrase “flat-screen TV,” as if they sell any other kind. Only now can I make sense of the way my grandparents’ generation used to talk of “color TV” long past the time when you could find a black-and-white TV for sale anywhere in America.
From my freshman dorm room in late 2000, the most high-tech thing I did every morning was log on to South Bend’s WNDU.com and look at the two-inch-square, low-resolution still image from the webcam on their transmission tower aimed at the Golden Dome, updated every few minutes—a grainy but comforting link to home. Websites didn’t have much to them back then, I can see myself telling my grandchildren one day. But things moved quickly. By senior year, as I was banging out my thesis on an early-model iBook, a few sophomores in another dorm were creating a website patterned after the “face books” that Harvard passed out at the beginning of the year so that we could figure out who was who in the dining hall.