I went out once, for a two minute walk to my polling place to vote in a special election for state senator. My candidate was running unupposed, but I wanted her to have at least a vote or two. An election official there told me that they were estimating that the turnout would be about 1.4%. Which is what you might expect from a dead-of-winter special election with an unopposed candidate, and with voting held on the coldest day in a couple of years.
That was the coldest day in a couple of years until last Saturday.
Cold was coldier; wind chill was chillier.
I didn't make it out of the house all day.
My big project, other than making sure the faucets were dripping, was finding my little ceramic space heater. Just in case.
There aren't a lot of places in my small home to store anything, and fortunately I was able to find it in the last place I looked. Of course, when you find something in the last place you look, it is, of course, the last place you looked. But in this case, I had exhausted all the other smaller closet possibilities and found it in my one good-sized closet. Where, in truth, I knew it would be. I just didn't want to unbury it from the stockpiles of toilet paper and paper towels that surrounded it.
Anyway, I never did end up using it. But at least I have it for the next time we have a snappy little cold snap and I'm stuck in the house.
There are worse places to be stuck during foul weather, whether that weather is a raging storm, which we are known to experience, or during bitter, nose-hair-freezing cold. It's warm (even without revving up the space heater. The larder is stocked. I have my books and an endless supply of "there's nothing on" available via cable.
But when fantasizing about being stuck someplace due to weather, which I have been known to indulge in on occasion, it's, frankly, never my own home. It's someplace in the middle of nowhere. The top of Mt. Washington during a blizzard. Or in a lighthouse.
Like Fastnet Lighthouse, which lies 8 miles off the coast of County Cork, Ireland.
And getting stuck there is what happened in December to four lighthouse workers. They were on Fastnet what they thought would be a couple of days doing maintenance to the lighthouse (unmanned since 1989). But they got caught there by Storm Barra, with its pummeling 100 m.p.h. winds, and ended up spending the week before a helicopter could get in to retrieve them.
Putting the bright side on things, one of the marooned men, engineer Paul Barron "said that it was a safe place to be as the country battened down the hatches to face the storm." Barron and his colleagues were well prepared. Sure, "the tower was 'shuddering a bit'", but the men had everything they needed for survival.
He says the lighthouse has kitchen facilities and they always bring additional food in case of emergency.
“It could be a fine summer’s day and there could be thick fog and the chopper wouldn’t take off so we always bring extra food. We are passing the time by watching Netflix! This is a good place to be in the eye of a storm. This lighthouse has been built a hundred years so it has seen a lot of storms.” (Source, Irish Times)
I love the fact that modern survival requires entertainment. There's always something on Netflix. (What did they watch, I wonder. Derry Girls? Peaky Blinders?)
Anyway, Fastnet Lighthouse is definitely the stuff that stuck-in-a-storm fantasies are made of. (That said, I probably would have spent the entire time shuddering in my bed with a pillow over my head.)
When I read the name Fastnet, by the way, my first thought was, Ugh! It's not a trad place name, but the name of some Internet Service Provider. And my first thought was wrong-o!
Fastnet Rock, or simply Fastnet, (possibly from Old Norse Hvasstein-ey 'sharp-tooth isle' is also called Carraig Aonair, meaning "lonely rock" in Irish). It is a small clay-slate islet with quartz veins, and rises to about 30 metres (98 ft) above the low water mark and is separated from the much smaller Little Fastnet to the south by a 10-metre (33 ft) wide channel. Fastnet is known as "Ireland's Teardrop", because it was the last part of Ireland that 19th-century Irish emigrants saw as they sailed to North America. (Source: Wikipedia)
Maybe I'll figure it out someday, but I have no idea where my Irish grandparents sailed from when they came to Amerikay in the 1870's. If they left from Cork (Cove/Kingstown), which so many emigrants did, then a Netflix-free Fastnet Lighthouse may well have been their last sighting of home.
And with that history, I'll say it again. There are worse places to get stuck in a storm.
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