From the hotel: strange, glacial beauty

2000-12-27T04:49:17+00:00

More television. During one of my restless moments, I opened the curtains to look outside. It was the first time I'd looked outside since twilight fell. I forget the eerie beauty that comes with ice storms. My window has icicles that vary between six and eight inches long. The asphalt parking lot twinkles in the light; there is at least an inch of ice there. I cannot even imagine what the roads must be like.

But strangest and most beautiful are the trees. The young pines will probably snap soon. They have gone from touching their toes to curled up in almost-fetal positions. But there are two older trees, shaped like redbuds, that are the most beautiful of all. Their habit of growing a profusion of slender branches as opposed to a few small branches gives them more acreage to collect ice.

The end result is a tree of spun glass, glowing in the lamplight. It is the ultimate irony of ice storms: the very thing that is so deadly is also incredibly beautiful.

From the hotel: can I please leave this room?

2000-12-27T02:26:45+00:00

I've had another flight canceled out from under me today. The airport is still shut down. I've been rescheduled on another airline on Thursday evening.Cabin fever is starting to set in. I had to go out to the other hotel for lunch today. My hotel is midway up on a hill, and does not have a restaurant. The next hotel over…er, well…UP…had a restaurant. Normally, going from one hotel to the other would take maybe twenty seconds. Today it took twenty minutes.

I slid across the parking lot, then wrapped my arms around the guardrail to bodily haul myself up the stairs. Mental note #1: how do hockey players deal with this all the time? Mental note #2: why didn't the hotel salt or sand these stairs and the parking lot?

The lunch was good. Well, decent, anyway. To avoid the crush of iced-in families in the main part of the restaurant, I sat at the bar. The young man who plopped down next to me explained, in the chatty way that people sitting in restaurant bars have, that he was a newlywed waiting for a flight out so that he and his new wife could go on their honeymoon. She showed up a few minutes later, and we all chatted as we ate.

I made sure to order enough food so that I wouldn't have to go out again for dinner. I boxed up the extra food and then went back outside…where I promptly fell down.

I ended up sliding across most of the top parking lot on my ass. Seriously. It was easier than trying to walk/slide/skate down. Once faced with the stairs again, I wrapped my arms around the stair rails and gingerly lowered myself down a step at a time, praying for mercy and unbroken bones until I reached the bottom parking lot. I got myself back to my room, cursing my now freezing and wet ass, and promptly changed into my pajamas so that my jeans could dry.

I took a nap, played computer games, called some friends, damned the phone bill I knew would be coming, and did my best not to go stir-crazy. Judging from Andy and Dan's laughter at me, I think I'm failing in that wish.

Brr. I think I need to turn the heat on again. It's getting chilly in here.

Sigh. There is something about the impersonal blankness of a hotel room that, when you're forced to stay in it for days at a time, eats into your soul. I find myself wishing for touches of comfort—pictures and art on the walls, cats twining around my feet or snuggling in my lap. A phone that occasionally rings, with friends on the other end of the line. A kitchen with real food—not candy and chips and other crap that I'm getting from the vending machine.

I want to be able to leave this room and go places without endangering my health or my life. I think I would make a very lousy Canadian.