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I had prepared my home for the loss of power by stacking firewood and filling water containers. We had enough food to be ok for several days, and camping stoves to cook on, and cold weather sleeping bags to sleep in. We even had a pair of snow chains for the van, which is very prepared for an austinite. The van’s tank was full. The chainsaws sharpened and gassed up. A 9mm handgun was stashed in a bag by the bed. A 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle illustrating various breeds of chicken was on the table, ready to go. It was unclear what kind of emergency this would be.

We looked in on neighbors, shared soup, and updated phone numbers. Everything was good on our street. Good meaning that no one was freezing to death or needed to get to the hospital or things like that. Across town though, power was out and water was out. People camped in their own apartments. I kept thinking about homeless people. The difference between being inside and being outside had shrunk, so homelesness seemed closer and I saw it in more detail, but the difference that remained was more important than before. It was clear people were about to freeze to death, it was just a question of how many.

As I write this, we still don't know. The Texas Department of State Health Services estimate has gone to 151. This represents deaths “certified” to have been caused by the freeze, but if someone dies of a pre-existing condition while wandering around in the cold, malnourished and dehydrated, it won’t be in that number. Also, it's like a natural law that governments reliably underestimate casualties for natural disasters if it makes them look bad, so a standard way to arrive at the number is the “excess deaths” method. Compare the number of deaths in previous years to the number in the year of the disaster. Buzzfeed published such an analysis for the Texas freeze and determined that over 700 people had died in Texas during the freeze. They produced the estimate in-house and say they had it checked by three epidemiologists, but did not provide either the data or the specific method of analysis. I don’t find it very credible, but fuck, 700 is a lot. I assume the truth is somewhere in between. 

We were in the pandemic quarantine bubble. If you're reading this from a future in which that is not relatable, and I hope you are, you have to imagine a full year and a half of fluctuating panic, shared by the whole world, subsiding into a locked down, uncertain restriction of all spheres of life except online. I write these words one year later, with one foot in and one foot out of the pandemic. I can still feel what it was like when the freeze began, when the covid fear was still sharp but monotony had already set in. 

My wife, my daughter, and I worked from home, went to school from home, and renounced most face to face social interaction outside the family. It was heartbreaking to lose all that connection, but we made a good go of it. Our summer vacation camping in the van, our daily routine, in close quarters was tightly optimized and we had the chance to do more hands-on parenting than we had in the past few years. We grew closer and seemed to like each other more. When the cold came and the power shut down, a bubble formed around our bubble. Suddenly we were deeper, more separate from the greater world than I had thought possible. Before, we only went to the grocery store when necessary and always wore masks, now there was no grocery store. School was canceled, even over zoom. All our remaining connections with the world, as well as our daily routines, were wiped from the dry erase board and replaced with disaster chores like “fill bathtub” and “wrap pipes with blankets”. I cut up half a cord of firewood and my daughter stacked it in the garage. We filled up our two 6 gallon water containers, charged the big travel battery, and then broke the seal on the chicken puzzle. The first morning after the big snow was dazzlingly bright. Sound was missing. Construction, the nearby freeway, local traffic… even the sound of our feet was transformed into the intimate squeaky crunch of snow that had never not been cold, compressed in foot deep ruts left by the single vehicle that drove down our street in a 24 hour period. We spent the morning sledding. We re-discovered “tending the fire” and other ancestral activities. My fingers hurt from playing the guitar. It was sweet. 

Things were not so sunny across town. We expected rolling blackouts to protect the grid, but what was happening had no rhyme or reason. Vast swaths of residential service areas went down and stayed down while empty skyscrapers downtown stayed lit for all to see. Many of us tried to come up to speed on what was a “protected circuit” and why. Conspiracy theories flourished as the benefit of the doubt was removed from The State. Multiplexes transformed into dark, aboveground cave systems where people could store themselves but not be warm, nor find water, nor relieve themselves. The wind and a lock on the door were only things keeping a person in a place like that, a thinning value proposition. A friend in ‘04 lost power and water in her multiplex and could no longer flush her toilet so we made an excursion to retrieve her and set her up in the spare bedroom. 

The next morning we woke up without power. The old couple next door had no way to heat water, so I brought them an electric hot plate and ran an extension cord through their backyard to the neighbors on the next street over who still had power. Before the freeze, we rarely thought about the street we lived on but now it seemed to enlarge and occupy our thoughts as the rest of town receded. People here seemed to be alright but stories of suffering and unrest from distant lands made their way to us. Distant meaning a mile or two across town. Civilization felt rickety. More and larger apartment complexes were without power or water, people were dying of cold and CO2 poisoning. 

We had a fireplace that kept the living room livable during the day, but it didn't vent well. At night, the bedroom door was sealed and designated the Warm Room. We had food and water and heat, so why leave? 

Soon we had the water/gas/power shutdown trifecta, but the internet was still up. It seemed backwards. I had the idea that civilization would disappear in reverse chronological order, starting with the most recent additions. The pointless stream of videos Facebook had painstakingly curated to hold my attention continued to stream to me in my cold, dark house, but my interests had changed. The dopamine circuit that normally kept my phone directed at my face had broken in the freeze. Now I was transfixed by tending the fire. My daughter, who had always like candles, could also be found staring into the embers for long periods of time, holding the poker. What a waste of add-space, I thought. But the fire could not answer any of our questions about what was happening and when it would end, so we conserved the big battery to charge devices to answer questions. When we went online, it was in search of practical information, and the place it seemed to live, strangely, was still Facebook.

This essay series is part of a project to document Texan’s experiences during the 2021 freeze. Do you have a story to share about the 2021 Texas freeze? Share it with my publication, Freeze Stories, on Medium. If its not filled with filth, I’ll publish it. Ok, I’ll publish it even if its filled with filth.