Kids and I just ventured outside to see what’s going on. I cannot stress this enough: The streets in Austin are just a sheet of pure ice at this point. Unless you absolutely need to be somewhere, do not get into a vehicle.
— KSV (@KSVesq) February 14, 202130 years or soago, the Lovely Wife and I lived in an Austin neighborhood just inside Mo-Pac, the north/south freeway on the west side of town.* The drone of traffic was such a constant we quit noticing it, until it was gone.
We woke that morning to silence. An eerie silence we couldn’t place. It was even quieter outside, and colder. For Austin, very cold. Not so much snow as, more typical for central Texas, an ice storm. Mo-Pac was iced over. It was empty. It was the source of the silence. We joked that the Rapture had come and, as expected, we were left behind.
It was a lovely day off/at home, and didn’t even involve a panicked dash to the store for emergency supplies of bread and milk. (We went to the store Saturday. A mistake. Had they announced the day for Thanksgiving was now February 14, oh, and a hurricane is coming on the 15th, it would not have been crazier.). The ice closure only lasted a day. We enjoyed the quiet. It was a nice day.
It’s a nice Texas winter memory.
*Missouri-Pacific. It ran on the ROW of an old train line
When I was a kid the road I lived on was closed from the first big snow till after mud season was over. Alas, it's paved now and we get hundreds of cars on it a day. When I was a child we would count the number of cars that went by on Memorial Day, a cemetery was down the road. I suspect some of those we might have gotten as many as fifty cars.
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of how, on the days right after 9-11, I was conscious of there being no planes and jets above, less traffic on the highway a mile and a half away so I could hear the train from the crossing four miles away and hear it come right up past our downtown not that much closer. Blessed quiet. One of the joys of a snow storm.