MEMORIES OF THE ICE STORM
Four tales from 1998’s deep freeze
‘She brings the ice’
It felt like the universe was playing a trick on Jolene Bear.
Of all the times her daughter could have come into the world, it had to be one month early, in the midst of the most devastating ice storm to hit Quebec in generations.
When Bear’s water broke on Jan. 9, 1998, the freezing rain had battered Montreal’s South Shore for nearly 80 consecutive hours — razing hydro towers, shattering trees and cloaking the region in darkness.
“The timing wasn’t great,” says Bear, a resident of the Kahnawake Mohawk territory. “Our power was out, we were sleeping at my mother-in-law’s. There were 10 of us in that house and the roads were all covered in ice.”
She woke up early that morning and knew right away the baby was coming. “I didn’t want to wake everyone up, I didn’t want to cause a panic, so I hid the fact that I was in labour for awhile,” Bear says. “My husband’s grandmother was the only other person awake, so we just sat and told stories and I hoped she wouldn’t notice.”
A few hours later, Bear called the local ambulance, which took more than an hour to navigate the ice and tree-covered streets before arriving at the Kahnawake home.
“When they wheeled me out — I’ll never forget this — I had to close my eyes because the ice pellets were hitting me in the face,” she says. “It was nice outside, sunny even, but that ice kept falling.”
“My water broke in the ambulance and I remember saying, ‘Hurry up! Hurry up! Hurry up!’ There was no stopping her.”
Five minutes after the paramedics carted Bear into the Lasalle hospital, Ta’kawisenhawe Ivory Stacey was born.
The name Ivory came from the child’s aunt — who accompanied Bear to the hospital. Her Mohawk name, Ta’kawisenhawe, commemorates the chaos of Stacey’s birthday. Translated into English, it literally means, “She brings the ice.”
That she was born in the midst of Ice Storm ’98 has given Stacey a small measure of celebrity in Kahnawake.
“When I told her the Gazette was doing a story about her birth, she kind of rolled her eyes like ‘No big deal,’ ” Bear says. “People in town will tell her, ‘You’re the Ice Storm baby, you’re the Ice Storm baby.’ She’s known for it in these parts.”
Stranded, ‘we rationed our fuel and made do’
Kelly Greig was lying in bed when she heard the trees crackling.
Freezing rain had been building up on the branches for hours and now they began snapping off and slamming onto the frozen ground. The thought that one of the trees could crash into the family farmhouse kept her awake for hours.
“When I woke up the next day, everything was frozen and the power was out,” said Kelly, who lived on her family’s farm in Ormstown during Ice Storm ’98. “My dad told us school was cancelled, which is an awesome thing to hear when you’re 10 years old.”
But the freezing rain wouldn’t let up and soon began wreaking havoc in Ormstown and the other farming communities spread across the Chateauguay Valley.
“I remember hearing a snap and I went to the upstairs window,” said Kelly’s mother, Mary Greig. “You could see the power line sagging and then all of a sudden the pole just snapped in half and then the next one snapped in half and the next one. I watched 20 poles go down like dominoes.”
For the Greigs — who had 50 cows that needed milking each day — there was no time to sit around and wait for help. Every morning, Kelly’s father, David Greig, would fire up a tractor-powered generator to get the milking machine in gear.
As David and his son tended to the cattle, Mary drew power from the generator to cook a meal and watch the news for updates on the government responses to the brewing crisis.
If the tractor ran out of diesel fuel or if they overloaded the generator, the whole operation would have screeched to a halt. There were diesel shortages across the valley since other farmers were also leaning on generators to keep their businesses alive.
“Had we known the power would have been out for 21 days, maybe we would have done things differently, but we didn’t know,” said David. “So we had to improvise. We rationed our fuel and made do with what we had.”
The initial onslaught of ice effectively stranded the Greigs on their property — severing its ties to the power grid and telephone lines. And with hydro poles strewn across the roads and downed trees blocking access to the house, there was little contact between the family and the outside world.
But then David came up with an idea that was equal parts brilliant and reckless.
“We went over to the telephone line with a crowbar and broke the icy crust off it,” he said. “I thought that if I could just get the wire reattached, the phone would work again and then we’d be in business. So we spliced it together and it actually worked.”
Kelly said she was just glad her father didn’t electrocute himself and light up like a Christmas tree.
“It was one of those things that, at the time, seemed like it could have gone either way,” she said.
Looking back, the Greigs say they’re lucky they made out as well as they did. Farmers in Hemmingford, about 30 kilometres east of Ormstown, went without power for a whole month and some lost livestock.
“When I look back, I just remember my mom and dad doing whatever they could to make it easier on us,” Kelly said.
“My mom, she was a schoolteacher, she had us reading, playing every board game you can imagine. I must have played her at checkers like 40 times and she never let me win.
“But we were also three kids stuck in a house with our parents for a month. We must have driven them crazy. I think we were all relieved when school started back again.”
‘Craziness’ of fighting cancer in freezing rain
On the fourth day of the 1998 Ice Storm, Montreal resident Romy Schnaiberg called the hospital to see if her latest round of chemotherapy would be cancelled.
“I remember the nurse just said, ‘Yeah, you have chemo, you need to come in,’ ” said Schnaiberg, a mother of two young children who had been undergoing treatment for breast cancer diagnosed in 1997.
“Life goes on. I thought maybe I don’t come in because there’s an ice storm. They thought I was nuts.”
The freezing rain shut down highways, damaged 24,000 hydro poles and downed thousands of kilometres of power lines — effectively bringing life to a halt in Montreal and beyond.
For Schnaiberg, however, there was no choice but to keep fighting the disease that was eating away at her.
And as if the difficulty of navigating motherhood and cancer treatment during a once-in-alifetime ice storm wasn’t enough, the chemotherapy drugs administered to Schnaiberg that day in 1998 sent her into anaphylactic shock.
“It looked like, for all intents and purposes, a heart attack,” she said. “I was in a packed emergency room in the middle of the storm. It was craziness.
“When things finally settled down, I told the doctors, ‘I’ve got a four-year-old and a two-year-old and I have to get home and make life normal for them. And they said, ‘You don’t understand. You’re really sick.’ It hadn’t occurred to me, until that point, that I was that sick.”
Following her doctor’s recommendations, Schnaiberg decided to move her family into her husband’s grandmother’s apartment in Côte-St-Luc. It was one of the few buildings in the city that hadn’t lost power during the storm.
“With the sickness, the kids had already had so much destruction in their lives,” said Schnaiberg. “I’d had surgeries, I’d lost my hair, I was weak from the chemo. My daughter Kelsey, she used to drag my wig around the house and say, ‘Mommy, put on your hair.’
“So you’re in this extreme situation — in and out of the hospital, staying at a relative’s apartment — and you end up having to ask for help. And you get so much support from your family, your friends, from complete strangers, from a doctor who offers his home phone number.
“There were communities cropping up everywhere, you know, wherever people needed help, people were cropping up to help them. I had people bringing me food, helping me out and all I needed to focus on was me and the kids.”
When the storm finally passed, Schnaiberg and her husband wrestled with the sorts of inconveniences that plagued families across the region: house repairs, insurance companies and finding a way to get back to normal. But while the storm presented her family with its own unique challenge, it also marked the beginning of Schnaiberg ’s journey toward remission.
“Sometimes people will talk about the storm and they’ll try to one up each other with horror stories,” she says. “I never say anything. For me, it was all part of a journey.
“I never thought of myself as a strong person before the cancer, but I think it took (the Ice Storm) for me to realize I was.”