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A Forest of Crystal

Friday, January 1, 2010

A storm only photographers could like ...

“It was 1:15 Friday morning when all the trees were exploding out back. It sounded like cannon fire or gunshots.”

It was December 12, just over a year ago, when a massive ice storm swirled into the Northeast. It would leave in its wake trees covered in up to an inch and a half of ice — a “terrible beauty” that devastated large swaths of New England, with N.H.’s Monadnock Region at the epicenter. Dave Eisenstadter, a reporter/photographer for the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, recounts in his first book, “The Weight of the Ice” [Surry Cottage Books, 2009, $16.99], what happened in that tortuous trip back to the 19th century — how thousands fared with no electricity, no water, no telephones, no heat and no means of transportation, many for days, even weeks. The story is deftly told with personal stories of fear, fortitude, community and Yankee ingenuity. You can almost feel the cold as you’re reading (the temperature in one woman’s house got as low as 18 degrees!) and then the sheer gratitude of a return to normal. Don’t miss the Ice Storm Fact Sheet on p. 183. There you’ll find the number of transformers, fuses and utility poles that Public Service of N.H. replaced and the number of miles of wire restrung. It was a lot.

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