Way back in 1993 the media wasn't yet tagging everything as the next apocalypse, but if they had been I'm sure all the news stations and printed newspapers(1) would have been heralding the snow storm that hit Knoxville that March as "SNOWPOCALYPSE 1993!". A friend reminded me on Facebook this morning that it's been twenty years ago today that it started snowing (thanks, Tonya!) and from what I remember it didn't stop for what seemed like forever. Joel and I were both seniors at UT that spring. My roommate, Susannah, and I lived at 1824 Scarlett Oak Place in the Country Oaks Apartment complex and Joel lived at Sutter's Mill, a rival apartment complex a few miles away. The two of us (Joel and I) were still just friends that March - not even close to dating, really - but we were spending a lot of our free time together. We talked on our land line phones several times a day and left messages tucked under the windshield wipers of each others cars in between classes (2). As for the snow storm, I really was trapped in my apartment (with heat and television and a VCR and running water but "trapped" all the same). Things became dire though when I realized I was going to run out of Diet Mountain Dew before the snow melted (I think I drank one every hour on the hour at that point in my life). When I called Joel and informed him of my impending doom, he said something like "No problem, I'll be right over. I have a Subaru and I can drive in the snow." I'm sure I scoffed at him and said, "I don't care what kind of car you have, you can't drive in this weather! The roads are treacherous and impassable. You will never make it here." Several hours later there was a knock on my door and I'm sure it's no surprise that when I opened it, there stood Joel with a grocery bag full of my much needed Diet Mountain Dews. He also brought all the fixins to make cajun rice and sausage and I'm guessing he had a six pack of beer in there too. While he cooked our dinner, he told a harrowing tale of slipping and sliding his way to Food City then helping other stranded drivers out of ditches and finally parking at the bottom of my apartment complex and walking up the hill in the blinding snow to save me from eminent caffeine withdrawal (and starvation). He really was a good friend.
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| SNOWPOCALYPSE! WITH ICECICLES!! |
At some point the snow must have melted enough that Susannah and I could make it out of town because by the end of that Spring Break week we were approximately 1100 miles south of Knoxville in Key West, Florida. Why we drove 1100 miles to go to the beach is beyond me now, but at the time it sounded like a good idea. Despite the rather touristy look of the photos I'm including here, we had a lot of good old fashioned spring break kind of fun on that trip. (All photos of the actual fun are, for the time being, safely hidden away where my children won't find them (3) and (4). )
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(1) How strange it now seems that way way back in 1993 most of us still got our news from the actual printed newspaper and not from the internet because the internet had just been invented and not all of us were tech savvy enough to have those dial up modem thingies (5) and so the morning paper was like a daily surprise of "gee whiz, I wonder what happened while I was sleeping last night?".
(2) Notes left on windshields, this is how we communicated before texting and emailing were invented. Most of the notes said things like "Meet me at O'Charley's after class." None of them said "I'm going to be in the library studying."
(3) All these years later, what I clearly remember about this trip (other than the many many many hours we spent riding in the car and the above-mentioned "fun") is driving through south Florida at daybreak and seeing mile after mile of devastation left behind by Hurricane Andrew.
(4) Please keep in mind that we were good Catholic girls (and I can say that without a hint of irony or innuendo) so our "fun" was less "MTV Girls Gone Wild" and more "What time does karaoke start?"
(5) Joel had a computer and a modem. He was the first person I knew who had this new-fangled technology.
Great memories! We lived in Tiffany Square Apartments during the blizzard at the bottom of a big hill and our car was a Toyota Corolla so we were definitely stuck for the duration. We walked up the hill to Weigel's for provisions and I remember the snow was up to Emily's waist. We were lucky though as I recall our law school friends down the street at Concepts 21 were not only trapped but also lost power for the week. I wish we would get another snow like that!
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