Inside America’s Polar Vortex

Florida is America’s “Sunshine State,” perhaps the most “tropical” of her North American states, but the temperatures Monday night and Tuesday morning dipped down to around negative 7 Celsius. Despite the bright sun and blue sky, it is bone-chilling cold, the kind of cold that makes you feel like your fingers might fall off if […]

Florida is America’s “Sunshine State,” perhaps the most “tropical” of her North American states, but the temperatures Monday night and Tuesday morning dipped down to around negative 7 Celsius. Despite the bright sun and blue sky, it is bone-chilling cold, the kind of cold that makes you feel like your fingers might fall off if you stay outside more than three minutes. I feel it when I help my mother carry the Christmas tree outside for the sanitation workers to carry away.
They say that talking about the weather is the sort of clichéd conversation you fall into when you have nothing else to talk about, but sometimes the weather is the most pressing point of conversation. It eats into our bodies and consumes our attention. Tuesday, my parents and I were driving from Florida to Georgia, states in the American south, which usually have mild winters, not too much colder than Jos in harmattan. You can often go out in December wearing only sweaters or light jackets. But Florida and Georgia with their below zero Celsius temperatures now have the feel of a typical winter in Wisconsin, the northern mid-Western state bordering on Canada where my university is. And by all reports, Wisconsin, where I will be heading next week, feels like the North Pole with temperatures at around negative 24 Celsius. Such dramatic weather conditions are caused by this mysterious polar vortex, science fiction-esque arctic winds that have embraced North America in its icy arms.
When we arrive at my grandmother’s house shortly before dark, she is outside, coated and hatted, digging in the outside chest freezer for vegetables to cook along with the supper she has made. I jokingly ask her if she is trying to get warm by sticking her head in the freezer. Arguably, the air outside is colder than the ice chest. She lives in a rangy old house where she raised four children. In the winter, she turns on the heater in the front room and spends most of her time there. Other than the bedrooms where we sleep, the rest of the house is not heated, and I can see my breath rising white in the air when I walk through the hallways.
She tells us the news that the pipes have frozen in the back of the house. The water in the pipes has turned to ice and will not come out. The hot water heater is not working. The toilet in the back room has frozen over. There is ice in the toilet bowl. Yes, ice in the toilet.
In Nigeria, we are used to having no water in the pipes. We have buckets and cisterns and tanks. There are open wells where you can draw water if need be. Last year, I went for about five months without having city water coming through the taps. I was grateful that the house where I was staying in Jos had a tank, though some of my other neighbours still had to go to the well every morning. In Kano, I would buy jerry cans of water from the young boys who came around pushing it in carts. Getting water was labour intensive and a source of worry, but we mostly knew where we could get it and how to conserve it. In America, normally, there is a constant supply of water coming through the taps into kitchens and bathrooms. Americans rarely keep many buckets around because they bathe in the showers of water flowing directly from the tap. But when the water goes out in times like this, when the pipes freeze up, we know less how to get water, just as, I noted last week, we know less about what to do when the electricity goes out—when much of the heating and cooking is done only with electricity.
It is good to have infrastructure that gives constant water and light, and I don’t think most Americans realize what a privilege it is to take such conveniences for granted. But becoming so accustomed to such comforts can also mean that people become helpless when those services are unexpectedly taken away. Weather conditions in America can also make such infrastructure failures life threatening. Fortunately, the electricity has not gone out in my grandmother’s house, but it has elsewhere in Atlanta and in parts of the continent further north. The Independent reports that a power outage in Newfoundland Canada “left 90,000 homes without electricity.” Such power outages can be deadly if people can’t find a way to keep warm. CBC reports that at least 21 people have died in the United States during this polar blast. (Of course, this number is miniscule compared to those who have died in disasters in Nigeria this year, both natural and man-made). One was an old woman with Alzheimer’s disease who wandered out of her house. Others died shoveling snow, still others were homeless, America’s poorest people, who live on the streets of one of the world’s wealthiest countries. Whenever I see a homeless person in the winter, wearing their unwashed layers of clothing and sitting on their strips of cardboard on the sidewalk in winter, I’m not sure how any of them survive year after year, and how such an existence can be possible in a country that exports NGO’s and foreign aid and the SUVs and “hardship” allowances that go with that aid. I am grateful for my mother’s family home and the warmth from the small heaters and the electricity that has not once blinked since we’ve been in Atlanta.
For water, we go around the house collecting large bowls we can fill with the trickle of water still flowing from the kitchen sink, but there are no real proper buckets or barrels to fill or to bathe with. Fortunately, a little creek runs behind my grandmother’s house and my father and I go out into the cold night through the woods with torch lights and one small mop bucket to gather water. I clean out a dustbin with disinfectant and fill it with water heated on the stove for a small bucket bath.
We huddle in the heated front room under blankets. I remember that Kannywood comedian Mikail Isah bin Hassan, aka Gidigo, has just arrived in the U.S. for a course and I call him. He is in Washington D.C., where there was a high of negative six Celsius on Tuesday. The cold is very difficult he tells me, but he puts on a big coat and gloves and a hat. He is the only representative from West Africa in a course that includes people from all over the world, and he plan to travel to other American cities like New York and New Orleans. We talk for a while but I find it more difficult to hear on my cheap American phone than my nicer Nigerian phone. I can feel my Hausa slipping under a creeping American southern twang.
Wednesday morning, I sit in bed with my laptop. My legs are covered with four blankets, my arms inserted into another blanket with sleeves. The temperatures slowly rise, until they are a few degrees above freezing. The water slowly begins to run through the taps in the bathroom, and the toilet tank begins to fill. “The water is back. Insha Allah there will be no broken pipes,” I happily write my friends, thirty seconds before the flood from broken pipes begins.