Even in "normal" times, life was tenuous at our house. We regularly ran out of necessary items, such as water, or key food ingredients, or firewood. I'd copied a lot of recipes from the Great Depression cookbook (from the library) which included creative substitutions for things we ran out of a lot. For whatever reason (poor planning comes to mind) we were constantly living on the edge, especially now that the job at the marina was finished and Dad hadn't been paid for the balance of the work (according to him- I have no idea what actually happened). Even in an average winter, that cabin was cold. You could look between the logs to see who had pulled up in the driveway, and the wind whistled right through the house. We consumed a huge box of mill ends every day just to keep the house tolerably warm.

So we were sitting ducks when the winter storm from hell, the worst I have ever seen, hit us. We didn't usually listen to the radio, so we had no warning when it struck and we were woefully unprepared. The temperature dropped to at least -35 degrees F, and there were 40 mph winds. Raphah and I consulted the wind chill graph on our Forest Service map. It didn't go down that far. The nearest figure we could find put the wind chill factor at 80 below. Everyone moved out of their bedrooms and clustered their beds in the living room, sealing off the bedroom doors to consolidate what heat we had. We spent all day long huddled right next to the stove. The water in the barrels froze, so we moved one of them close to the stove. For once, the pot didn't smell at all- because it was frozen.

At night, some of the kids, including Sarah, slept with Mom and Dad. I got sick and tired of being cold. Even with two pairs of long johns, 2 pairs of socks and a sweat suit, I was still cold at night. So I slid one sleeping bag into another to make it double, laid several blankets on top of my mattress, then the sleeping bags, and more blankets, and tucked all the blankets in tightly. Dad said that I was a dirty pig to sleep like that without sheets; I didn't care. I was warm and they were still whining. We turned the radio on now, and heard that in Priest River, they were using one of the schools as an emergency shelter. I said I thought we should go to it. Dennis sneered at me and said we didn't need help, we would survive. Stuff like that was for city people, not us.

The storm raged on, knocking trees over like toothpicks. The truck was so cold it wouldn't start. We had no idea if the roads would have been passable even if the truck would start. And in the middle of all this, we ran out of firewood. It was the worst possible thing we could have run out of. It it hadn't been for the tree that had been blown down onto the Airstream trailer right next to our house, we might not have made it. We couldn't have driven anywhere and we had no phone. As it was, we still had the problem of getting the tree cut and split and brought into the house. It was a fairly tall, small diameter tree, the type that has minimal limbs for most of its length, which was good; it wouldn't need to be limbed or split much.

We all (except for Mom) bundled up as warmly as we could. I put on layer after layer of clothing and my Polaris snowmobile coat, and then we stepped out the door. The wind almost blew us over and cut right through our multi-layered clothes as though we were naked. Staying upright took a lot of effort. Walking took even more. This was cold as we had never experienced it before. Snow was blowing all over the place, making visibility difficult. Eliyah started cutting the tree into rounds, and we struggled to carry the logs to the house. It was hard to see where we were going, and it was mind numbingly cold. Our gloves were frozen in no time, and the house seemed like an oasis of warmth. Mom was thankful for the first log or two we brought in. After that, she got mad at us when we came in to warm up for a minute, or to trade out our gloves for warm ones, saying that we were making the house cold every time we opened up the door. Every trip to and from the tree to the house seemed like an incredible effort, and the longer we were out there, the harder it became. We had moved a lot of it when I went in to change out my gloves and thaw out. It seemed that even a few seconds of warmth would help. Mom screamed at me and told me I was making the house cold, to get out. Rachel was inside by now, helping to make cookies, but I was not welcome in there, and no, I couldn't have a cookie. She wouldn't let me change my gloves out, either. I stumbled back outside, infuriated with her keeping warm from our labor and not even allowing us to get warm or have dry gloves. Barely able to keep my footing against the wind, hauling the wood back and forth began to seem like some kind of a surreal nightmare. And I was so sleepy, so tired. Stumbling back from the house, I saw a patch of soft snow. It looked so inviting. Yes. I would just lay down for a few minutes and rest. I curled up into the snow as the anger melted away. I wasn't even cold anymore. I was warm, contented, and I drifted off. Sarah came by and bothered me, told me the work was done. I didn't care. She told me to come into the house. I told her I was fine, Mom told me not to come inside, and the snow was warm, I was OK. Luckily, she didn't leave me there. She probably thought I was crazy to try to go to sleep in the snow, but she was used to her sister doing weird things. She kept at me until she got me into the house.

I thawed out. My skin was red and and so itchy; no, the muscle itself itched horribly. We made it through that storm, but my respect and trust in my mother never quite recovered..

After the storm, Mom and Dad's bed stayed in the living room where they'd moved it to be closer to the stove. Raphah and Sarah moved in to the cedar bedroom. It was still too cold for anyone to inhabit the other bedroom, but eventually, Rachel and I moved into there, with me on the top bunk and Rachel on the lower one.

There was still snow, but spring was just around the corner and our spirits improved. I started planting garden seeds that we'd gotten from the food bank in pots. I had no experience in gardening; my only sources were Back to Basics and the wealth of Mother Earth News magazines we had. Consequently, I started seedlings that spring which I have never grown since in pots, such as soybeans and bush beans. When we ate grapefruits one evening, I noticed that one of the seeds had a root. I planted it, and soon there was a sturdy, slender green sprout thrusting its way into the world, full of hope. I was hooked. From then on I bugged everyone I knew for seeds and considered it some kind of plant murder to throw them away when they could be planted instead.

Also, I was drawing and painting again, having recovered from the incident at Priest Lake where Mom went through my sketchbook, telling me which drawings were demonic and had to be ripped out and burned. I had lost almost half my work, and she had an unpleasant habit of criticizing the rest of it, telling me how she thought it should be. I never understood why she didn't just make her own drawings. Now, however, she spent a lot more time talking to Yahweh, writing down prophecies and dream interpretations, and singing songs he had taught her. When she wasn't doing that, there were the basics of daily survival to attend to.