Hypothermia

below. Getting up, he made sure that his boss had gone back into his office then discreetly closed the door to his own. He called her number on his cell phone; she was just leaving a benefit luncheon nearby. He looked at his watch: it was a few minutes after one o’clock. They arranged to see each other, even though it was just for a short while before he headed back to the suburbs. Then he called his house and told the Argentine woman who looked after the children that he had to attend a business meeting, but that he would be home early.
    It snowed heavily without stopping all through the night—all of Wednesday, and half of Thursday. The snowflakes were the size of walnuts, at times. The temperature stayed well below freezing, so that the snow piled up steadily without slowing down.
    What was at first celebrated as a blessing—in Washington, D.C., schools, banks, and the federal government all shut down at the slightest threat of inclement weather—became, after the first twelve hours, a cause for concern: the first morning he had to climb out of the house through the windows to shovel away the snow that didn’t stop falling, and then keep clearing it away every little while to keep open their only exit. He dug an exhausting system of tunnels out from the front door so that they could reach the trash cans—the kitchen door remained blocked—and to get to the toolshed, where he kept the sleds and other snow toys. The car, which they never parked in the garage, was completely buried, and the whole street was a snowdrift that reached up to his chest and was well over his older daughter’s head.
    On Wednesday, starting early in the morning, they had a fantastic time, sledding down the hills in the park. The forced break brought on by the snow put the whole neighborhood into a mood unlike any he’d seen before. All his neighbors gathered on the slopes, in such a way that the upper part of the hill looked like a beach: dozens of adults and their dogs watching children sliding down deep into a white sea. In the afternoon, back at the house, they raised an igloo and built a giant snowman, then glutted themselves on hot chocolate. After putting the girls to bed he spoke on the phone with his wife: he was getting worried that the county workers had not yet begun plowing the streets.
    On Thursday they took things easier: they watched cartoons all morning before going out to play. Then they opened up the igloo, whose doorway had become buried during the night. They tracked, without much luck, the paw prints of some hungry raccoon that had been foraging in the yard for food. After lunch they noticed that it had stopped snowing and the sun was just peeking through, so they went to go sledding again. Lacking the energy of the day before, they soon returned to the house, where they watched cartoons the rest of the afternoon. The girls were delighted to have sausages for dinner a second time, but he wasn’t so thrilled: he was getting fed up with his own lousy cooking. They didn’t hear the roar of a snowplow that day either.
    On Friday he spent the morning digging out the car, possessed by the hope that they would soon be clearing the street. In the afternoon they dragged the sleds to the hill, but after sliding down the first time they noticed how difficult it was to climb back up because the snow had turned to a sheet of ice. They made snow angels on the park’s basketball court, then almost got hypothermia pretending to be Eskimos living in the igloo. They watched all the cartoons on TV. For dinner, he thawed out some hamburgers.
    They were out of juice, but still had enough things for breakfast, lunch, and dinner through Sunday. If the snowplow didn’t come by then to clear their street, on Monday he and the two girls were going to have to make a big supermarket run on the bus. The very thought of such a trip seemed nightmarish: the emergency route used by public transit was four blocks away, a distance he would not normally have minded walking, but the idea of hauling the shopping bags through such deep snow struck him as actually frightening.
    Sunday morning was, frankly, abysmal. After lunch—he was washing the dishes from their lunch of tuna and saltines—his older daughter realized that they had not taken any pictures of the igloo to show their mother, so they got out the camera only to discover that it had no film. Let’s go buy some, he told them, with the joy of one surprised to find himself set free.