Oysterback, Maryland. -- There was a big snowstorm last week, and it was a while before the plows got down to Oysterback, so most people were stuck at home for a couple of days. Worse, the cable went down and stayed down for almost a week.
Without their electronic babysitter, most people were getting pretty squirrely by the end of the first day. By the second day, if Satan had come around Oysterback with a satellite dish, even Reverend Briscoe might have at least listened to his sales pitch.
When you live this far back up the marsh, it's hard to get any kind of TV reception at all. Especially at my place, since Prof. Shepherd took the .12-gauge and blew out the Magnavox over the bar when that snallygaster Newt Gringrich put his piggy little face on CNN once too often.
Now, I, Desiree Grinch, proprietor of the Blue Crab Tavern, have inner resources that I am able to fall back on when I'm snowed in and the cable goes down. I occupied my time by reading my way through the works of Anthony Trollope and experimenting with different hair colors. By the second day, I was Sunflower Terra Cotta blonde, halfway through "The Austace Diamonds" and comtemplating Sorrel Toast and "Barchester Towers" if I didn't kill Earl Don first.
Did you ever notice that men don't know how to be sick? Every five minutes they need a glass of orange juice or their pillows fluffed up or you to call 911 because they felt a twinge. A woman can be dying and she'll get out of bed and go to work, but let a man get the sniffles and all hell breaks loose. Finally, I went downstairs and opened the bar, just to get away from him. Even if no one came in, I would be out of earshot of Earl Don and his deathbed need for me to fetch him a Kleenex not two feet away from his hand. Without TV, he was as lost as a pig in a peach orchard and twice as much trouble, especially with a head cold.
As you can tell, not everyone around here is capable of entertaining himself in such a productive fashion as I. Once some people lose their TV, they tend to get a real bad case of the whimwhams, if you know what I mean and I think you do. So when people started to trickle into the Blue Crab late that afternoon, even though the roads were still bad, I wasn't much surprised.
"Colder and partly cloudy," Huddie recited when he came up from the harbor to grab a cup of hot coffee. "I went into such bad withdrawal without those "Simpsons" re-runs that I actually had to go outside and shovel two feet of partly cloudy out of my boat."
If that weren't enough, he said his mother-in-law Miss Nettie went so stir crazy she went out and chain-sawed up that old tree that fell down in the yard when Huddie and Junie Redmond backed into it with their motorized Port-O-Sand duck blind (pat. pending) when they were trying to get her old antenna set back up again so she wouldn't miss "One Life to Live."
Just about then, Doreen Redmond came in, carrying a bad case of kid overload. She didn't even notice my new hair color, which
you would think she would, being a professional, and not one to be selfish with her opinions. "My Gawd," she said, "Junie woke up this morning, turned on the TV and said "the cable still isn't back up; if it doesn't come back up soon, we might actually have to talk to each other. He's in the kitchen tryin' to cook something with that bluefish that's been in the deep freeze since last summer."
She shuddered. "I told the kids that I had to come down to the Curl Up and Dye because I had to make sure that the pipes weren't gonna freeze up, but I just had to get out of there. If Jason plays that damn Bob Dylan CD one more time, I might have to call over to The Towers in Cambridge and reserve a room for myself. Why can't these kids get their own music instead of playin' ours all over again?"
"If you can remember the Sixties, you probably weren't there," Huddie said to the deer head over the pool table and laughed a hollow laugh that turned into a strangled sob. "What'm I gonna do without my football?" he cried, and put his head down on the bar, his emotions just all tore up. "I dreamed last night that Mike Ditka's hair had its own pre-game show!"
"I need my cable and I need it now!" It was just too much for Doreen; she broke down too, and I knew I was going to be close to the edge if something didn't happen soon. There's only so much a person can take. We looked at each other; then we did the only thing we knew how to do under these circumstances.
The sunset was streaming through the window, the color of warm beaches in Miami, when Earl Don snuffled his way downstairs in his good shepherd bathrobe and his sheepskin slippers, pitifully asking if we were out of cold tablets. He found us all sprawled on the pool table in the last shaft of sunlight, huddled against the coming night lifting our feeble voices against the forces of darkness and the decline of civilization.
We'd worked our way through the lyrics to "Gilligan's Island," "The Flintstones," "I Love Lucy," "Happy Trails," "That Girl," "Secret Agent" and "Rawhide." Now we were working on our three-part harmony for "The Brady Bunch" and hotly debating the Patty Duke question. Was it Patty or Cathy? Were they cous-ins, unbearable cous-ins, or cous-ins, identical cousins?
L Cabin fever is a terrible thing, that's all I've got to say.
?3 Helen Chappell is the amanuensis of Oysterback.