I grew up in Rochester, so I should probably know what an ice storm is, but what just happened here is brand-new in my experience. On the night of March 3, a Sunday, some sort of strange, gentle, superchilled rain came down over a large part of western New York. It coated every power line with a perfect cylinder of ice nearly an inch thick, from which ideally space icicles, like the tines on a soil rake, descended, all exactly the same length. The freeze held through early Tuesday. On Monday, if you looked out any window for a few minutes, you were certain to see, against a background of glittering Ace combs, the bough of a tree come crashing down. There was no wind, nor had there been any the first night. It seemed more a demonstration of the patient principles of candlemaking than a storm. At a distance, the ice effects were white, but when you drew close enough to a tree to be surrounded by the continual worry-bead crackling of its fretwork, and stood there, ready to duck at any moment, you saw that it had become incorporated into a clear and disturbingly clinical arrangement of pristine pipettes and test tubes, each holding a once-natural element of the organism--a bud, a twig, one of those perky citizens you had been counting on to function as usual in a few months--in an elaborate cryopharmaceutical experiment.

I drove down the streets today (Tuesday) feeling at times that it was all very familiar, that Ansel Adams calendars had prepared me for this, but then, jumping out again and again from the arty, grainy black-and-white photography that slowly moved past was a sudden apricot-colored splash of discomfort where a bough had torn itself free or a trunk had split in half. On the streets I've seen, half of the good big trees are ravaged. The younger ones, planted about twenty years ago to replace all the elms, are especially painful broken sights. Conifers did somewhat better than deciduous trees. The tall weeping spruce next to our house weeps more than usual but has lost no limbs. Stuck high up in it before the storm was a plastic dragon kite, which we had repeatedly tried and failed to extricate; the morning after the storm, it lay in two pieces on the grass. My wife said, "Well, at least something good has come out of this." I said yes, it was like bombing all of Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein. She reminded me of Frost's poem about whether the world will end in fire or in ice. And if we hadn't just flown more than a hundred thousand sorties over a distant place, I would give in more to grief about all these trees, but in the face of that devastation this sort of rare and unmalicious natural catastrophe, in which nobody dies, and some leftovers spoil in some refrigerators, and people go out on tentative camera expeditions to pass the time until the cable TV comes on again, makes me think that we over here have gotten off very easily. We deserve at least this much ice after that much fire. Many of the trees will grow back, after all, as from a bad pruning. As they thaw now, the water is hearteningly visible, hurrying along the bark underneath the ice layer, like blood.

- Nicholson Baker (1991)