Editor’s note: This commentary is by Jackie Rae Johnson, of Barre, a lifelong Vermonter, who worked in human services for many years, is now a sometimes CCV instructor, and a volunteer as a guardian ad litem in the family court system.
[I] had a conversation with a co-worker who asked the question as fall approached its end, “Why do poor people leave their kids’ toys outside in the winter?”
I contemplated the answer but it was far too long for that moment. Here it is, the impact of poverty on toys in the winter:
When I was young in the ’70s, I had two kids and lived in the woods. The place in the woods was a trailer. It often had no water and sometimes no heat. And the roof leaked. One day in the winter, because it was winter and I was bored of being poor and isolated with two little kids — bored is a substitute for the fear that comes with poverty and isolation — I took out a wall. That’s how those kinds of things happen.
Another boredom related activity was rearranging furniture. One day my husband, a long-distance truck driver usually gone for weeks at a time, brought home a couch, an enormous thing that a friend gave him. It was a very nice couch, sturdy, well-made, a bit faded, but in quite good shape. It was huge and our space was not. For months I lived with that couch dominating not just the living room, but all of the trailer.
On a warm, dark day in the midst of a January thaw, I dragged that couch through the living room, around the corner to the kitchen and out the back door. It took me most of the day and I thought at one point that it was caught, half in and half out – and what a tragedy that would have been – but no, I got it out the back door and there it stayed, forever I guess.
We didn’t use the back door much anyway. The bank that had been cut away in the steep hillside to make a flat place for the trailer had kind of washed down so there wasn’t much space there. There was less once I got the couch out.
Back to the important things like our water system. It was a poor well. In the summer there was hardly any water. In the winter the line froze. The first winter I tried very hard to keep the water running. It would freeze and I’d crawl under the trailer to thaw it out with a propane torch.
Propane torches are one of those things that all poor people have. You have to have them because they can do lots of things like loosen lug nuts, or start stove fires with wet wood. They are just a nozzle with a shut off valve that screws onto a tank of propane gas. You open the valve, hold a cigarette lighter to the end and whoosh: instant very hot fire.
Cigarette lighters are another thing that poor people have maybe to light cigarettes but other uses abound: lighting recalcitrant ovens, burning the frayed ends of nylon rope so it won’t come untied while it is holding up the door on the car and you have had to use it because the duct tape has run out, lighting candles, first line of attack when starting wood fires, and lighting propane torches.
The point with the torch is to heat the water pipe enough to thaw the ice without melting the pipe. I understood that you had to thaw from the house side of the pipe to the ground because otherwise you might get a burst pipe. Well, I never got a burst pipe, and several times I managed to thaw them, but I gave it up one night and that’s why we hardly ever had running water in the wintertime.
To tell why I gave it up, you have to know that my neighbor down the road kept pets. Back than she had too many pets and one was a Burmese cat. The cat had kittens – with an appropriate mate – that’s another thing poor people do about boredom — they have their pets have babies – and one of the kittens became a birthday present for my younger daughter. One day when the kitten was half grown she disappeared never to be found.
It was about a year later that I stopped thawing water. That night about 2 a.m. I found the water not running so I grabbed up my torch, my cigarette lighter and my flashlight, and crawled under the trailer – the pipe coming in was about midway under. Because of the bank washing out and a lot of the dirt washing in under the trailer – see above – the space was pretty tight and you had to go under on your belly. The flashlight wouldn’t work – poor people’s flashlights hardly ever do because they keep them but never replace the batteries – but I’d been there before. I knew where I was going, found the pipe and rolled onto my shoulder to free up the torch so I could light it. I opened the valve, held the lighter flame to the gas and suddenly the whole underside of the trailer was lit in the brilliant white light. I rolled back to my belly with the torch in one hand facing the pipe and there just to the right laid out perfectly was the gleaming skeleton of a young cat.
Something happened to me then in the hot white light with my belly on the cold hard dirt and the bottom of the trailer against my back, the empty skeleton watchful. I couldn’t stand it. What I mean is, I backed out from under the trailer, making funny noises that I couldn’t stop making, and I sat in the snow by the edge of the steps and watched the propane melting snow and charring wood and I never went under the trailer again and so each winter the water stopped running and stayed stopped.
However, one needs water. When I had a car, I hauled water in 10-gallon jugs from my mother’s. A gallon of water weighs about eight pounds. When the driveway was plowed and I could drive up it, getting the water took the time of the drive and the time to fill and the time to walk from the car in.
When the driveway was not plowed – it was not a financial priority — the water could take a good half-day or more because it had to be hauled up the drive by sled. Still, that was faster than when there was no car. Then I melted snow.
Melting snow is a long procedure. First you fill a good solid kettle with snow. Than you put it on the stove. The kettle really needs a good solid bottom because the heat below and the cold of the snow are hard on it. A kettle that is 10 or so inches high and a foot across that is full of snow will produce an inch of water as it melts, but this inch helps reduce the time for the next added pack of snow. A kettle of this size holds close to 20 quarts of water. This is about enough to do dishes for one meal or wash one child’s head. The water is recollected and will flush the toilet once if poured directly into the bowl with enough force created by pouring from above and quickly. It’s the weight of the water that makes it all go down, so you don’t want to lose that momentum in a slow pour. Running water from pipes is a great efficiency of time but it does reduce one’s appreciation for water.
I mentioned duct tape earlier – not duck tape. It is a necessity like cigarette lighters and propane torches. This silvery colored threadlike tape is used to tape up ducts. It is also used to tape up exhaust systems. When the tape runs out, a coat hanger or two will do. They are just harder to handle and really require pliers. Duct tape can do doors also and windows in a pinch. The tape was crucial for the maintenance of the Volkswagen Beetle car I had when I was young. Duct tape provided support for doors, windows and plugged various holes that were a mystery to me.
Like all its tribe, the Beetle’s heater didn’t really work. I have heard that you could get heaters to put in them but I never saw one. These cars were like no other cars. They had air-cooled engines in the back. In front was an empty space that someone thought to advertise as a trunk. It was like a larger glove compartment. It was the nothing between you and the tree you might slide into, the box of air between you and the truck that ran head on into you. It was also, I suppose, the reason that the cars had no heat.
In the winter I drove many miles with blankets wrapped around my legs. The windshield never needed defrosting – good thing – because the temperature inside and outside the car was exactly the same. My car shared these characteristics with all the others of its kind, but it had a special feature of its own. The throttle linkage would come undone from the throttle. I don’t know too much about it but there was a wire-like line with a small bar on the end. That was attached to another stick-like thing but whatever was supposed to attach them was gone. In my car they were hitched to each other with a small hose clamp. Though the clamp was small, it was not quite small enough. Included in this assembly with the two car parts, to make enough bulk for the clamp to clamp, was a twig. Then you could tighten down the clamp and everything would be all stuck together and when you stepped on the gas the car would run.
On occasion, it would not and then you knew that the little assembly under the hood or boot had come undone. The engine would slow and the car wouldn’t go. If I was lucky I could kind of coast off the road before stopping. And if not – well, it was a Volkswagen bug. I could push it by myself. Then the search for the small hose clamp and the twig. Of course, twigs are pretty much available, but I’ll tell you, when you have found and prepared a twig just the right length, long enough to hold, not so long as it rubs on engine parts – and just big enough around to add the extra bulk for the clamp – you take the time to look for it rather than a new twig. And usually it was there caught among various wires and the engine along with the clamp. First triumph, you know. And than reattaching, not much of a problem in the summer but in the winter, desperate with the kind of peculiar tension of winter when hopeless sobbing was always a threat – then hitching that little arrangement back together, cold metal, cold screwdriver, cold hands – that was another thing.
The only other Volkswagen I ever had, was a Rabbit. The Rabbit was my favorite car. It ran. It was cheap. It was front wheel drive. I loved the Rabbit. When the frame fell apart and there was no fixing it, I cried as if it was a pet. In the time I had it, it always went where we were trying to go. I never got stopped by a cop. Good thing. For only six months of that time was it legal. That’s quite an event – to afford a legal car, to have a current registration and an inspection sticker at the same time.
The cold was always the thing though. Once a man — a good, kind man — said to me that he liked the winter more than any other time of year. When he said it, he was standing beside his year-old, four-wheel-drive Subaru with new winter tires on it. And he was wearing his fleece and standing in his Timberlands. And he was getting ready to drive back home to his newly renovated and insulated old farmhouse.
In the cold nothing works and everything costs more. In the cold, you go out to the car in the morning, shoes squeaking on the snow. Squeaking means real cold. When you sit on the seat, the heat starts to drain out of you through your buttocks, and you put the key in the ignition and your forehead on the steering wheel and then you turn the key. The thing is, the chances are better than even that the car won’t start. It sure won’t start the first try, and likely not the first trip out because things don’t work in the cold.
When you are poor, there is this feeling that if something is not needed from spring through fall, then it is not worth spending scarce money on, like new car batteries. Or socks. You do need fuel, and a furnace that works. Of course, running water is nice but there you have it. Heat is most important!
I’ll explain socks, which may be harder to understand than car batteries. One time when the car was stuck on the side of the snow-buried driveway on the rare occasion when my husband was home, he decided what he needed was more weight on the backend and then he could get the car out. I should be the weight. I got into my coat and started for my shoes, no boots – that’s part of the poor person thing also. But I had gone a further step, one I cannot remember starting but had somehow come about: I had no socks; why bother? They cost money. But that night I pulled on a pair of my husband’s that were lying around by the door before slipping into my sneakers and then dutifully went out to sit on the trunk of the car while he tried to get it out.
It was a rough ride, the car slewing dangerously from side to side roaring down the driveway, still half stuck, half skidding, until we reached the end of the driveway and the open road where we stopped. There was not much to hang onto on the cold car and mostly I stayed on by bracing my feet one way or the other against the bumper and hanging onto the antenna, but all I could think about as the car bucked and slid and snow shot up from the spinning tires, was how warm socks were, how very, very warm they were. From then on, I treated socks as a winter necessity as much as coffee in the cupboard, though not quite to the level of fuel in the furnace.
Being poor is difficult, and as winter approaches, one’s mind and desires turn to a very short list of what must be on hand. And that is why in the spring, the toys rise through the snow like forgotten shrubbery, and the heart is glad because soon you’ll hear a gurgle in the pipes and the water will begin to run, and in the short-sighted future of the truly poor but hopeful, winter will never happen again.