In one of my earliest memories, I’m sitting on the floor of my living room in candlelight while the world collapses. The kitchen clock tells me it’s late in the afternoon, but out the windows lies an apocalyptic dark, as if my Berkshires home is being eaten by a glacier. Sometimes the outdoors flashes with light, banging and crashing. I don’t know what is happening. My mom rocks on her chair in the corner, my dad sits on the old brown loveseat beside the blacked-out television, and my brother sprawls pouting on the couch. I am four years old and in awe.
The ice storm of 2008 took place over a single day, but it stretches long in my memory as my first encounter with the extremes of nature. Unnamed, the storm struck quickly and with violence: in twenty-hours, it cut a swath of devastation from Albany through Massachusetts and New Hampshire up to southern Maine. On December 11th, rain burst deep-black clouds and “supercooled” in midair, achieving the limbo-state of being both entirely frozen and still, somehow, liquid—that is, until hitting any hard surface. Residents across New England awoke on December 12th to roads and sidewalks and rooftops and vehicles and trees and powerlines all coated with a thick, heavy layer of ice. Pavement buckled, windshields cracked, and trees got heavier and heavier with ice until they collapsed, snapping electrical wires on their way down. Not only did the power lines spark out of commission, but they stayed out: the roads in the storm’s path were almost all of the winding, steep, and rural sort that ice renders truly impassable. Over one million residents of Massachusetts lost power. Some got it back a few days later; for others, it took weeks. The whole of Ashfield was out of commission.
In the days leading up to the storm, when the meteorologists began their prophesying, I imagine my parents grew nervous. How do you occupy a four-year-old and a six-year-old in such weather, and without power? The usual staple of pacification—the television—would be gone. I think my brother and I eased their worries, or at least did not live up to the worst possibilities. I remember wanting nothing but to stare out the window at the falling ice just visible through the darkness, watching it collect on the boughs and branches and hearing them then snap and crash. Looking back, there was something certainly, strangely sadistic to it all, finding delight in the destruction. My first apocalypse, and I was thrilled. My youth, spent sheltered and safe thanks to my parents, was lived within a finely constructed world, in which I only saw what I was allowed to see. But now, in the storm, I finally noticed the rivets and bolts and planks and fabric holding it all together—noticed them because they were shaking.
The following morning, when I awoke, the sun shone dimly through thin clouds onto an entirely foreign backyard. The thick ice grafted over the lawn looked a sickly green, the dead grass it covered translucently visible. The trees towering along our driveway had somehow survived, although they now all arched under the weight of the ice. Every few hours a crack like a cannonshot came from somewhere up in the woods; my father explained that trees were getting so cold they cracked and fell. I took that to mean the trees were somehow exploding, like ice had dug beneath the bark and randomly decided to burst out. None of this was comfortable. This was not my home. I stood inside the comfort of my bedroom or kitchen and looked onto a landscape I had never seen before. The dissonance frightened me. The constructed world had been shaken, and now there were holes. I had a bumpy ice rink for a backyard, and we ate dinner by candlelight for a few days, and my parents could do nothing about it. They could not patch the holes; like me, they had to wait. The terrible truth of catastrophe is how it levels the world.
I thought of all this recently, seventeen years later, in the wake of two more devastating New England storms. In January 2026, a snowstorm slowly trundled from the Rockies through the South on its way up to the Northeast, dumping anywhere from a few inches to four feet of pure, fresh, fluffy snow. In February, a blizzard gathered in more locally, and dropped another round, this time heavy and dangerous. Homes lost power. Roads were closed for days. My college classes were moved online for two days each time. My street was perfectly silent and snowcovered and unrecognizable. I had food and shelter through these storms; I was lucky. But my city shut down. Even its government could do nothing about the weather or its devastation. I was not scared, though. What’s a few more holes?
An Editor-in-Chief, 2025-2026.
