FRIENDS and family have been calling my mother, who lives in Bangor, Maine, to ask if she's OK after a huge ice storm felled trees and power lines willy-nilly, turning the Northeast states and Eastern Canada into a disaster area. Cold news from Down East
''I'm embarrassed to say the worst thing I've had to put up with is no cable TV,'' she told me. Well, that and having to house my sister Jane and the two grandkids, refugees from their lakeside house in rural Ellsworth. Meanwhile, Jane's husband George and Mason, the cocker spaniel, are holding the fort.
My brother Chris loves this kind of stuff. He describes an eerie, glacial, nighttime landscape: Everything is encased in a thickening coat of gleaming crystal. The only sound is snapping branches - the only light sparks flashing from transformers and downed wires.
Next day, he slipped carefully out to my sister's house in his four-wheel drive, cutting away fallen trunks with a chainsaw and picking a path through the live wires. There, he managed to start up the balky gasoline generator and wired it up to the pump on the well so George could stop melting saucepans of snow on the wood stove for washing and flushing. Days later, there's still no power.
An ever-inventive nature is pulling out the stops this winter - earthquakes, typhoons and now this. Ice storms usually turn the world into a glittering showcase that melts into ordinary, hum-drum reality in a few hours. Not this time.