During Parents Weekend we experienced something I had never seen before in New England: significant snowfall before Halloween. The varsity field hockey game had to be suspended at halftime, and the varsity soccer games were also called off before they were completed. Somehow the cross country teams managed to race. The weather did not faze our Groton Zebras—very few contests ended in defeat. By the time the football team finished beating St. Paul’s, at least an inch of snow covered the gridiron . . . and the storm had only just begun. It snowed through the music concert and made drives back to hotels particularly difficult for weary parents. I prefer not to think about what folks from New Orleans, the Carolinas, California, or other “tropical” climes were thinking about the region where their children were going to school!
Despite how busy the previous days had been, I rose very early on Sunday morning—around 4 a.m. I went downstairs, turned on the television and, more or less by default, ended up watching a documentary about famous ghosts in New England. It was a bit eerie. Eyewitnesses recalled spectors roaming through graveyards and the bone-chilling cold of a haunted house. A barmaid told the tale of a painting falling from a wall when a non-believer entered a room and then—my TV went off. Were spirits afoot? I live in the home in which Endicott Peabody’s daughters had lived during their later years. Were they unhappy with me? I don’t know, but they could not have been impressed with my impractical inability to find a working flashlight. I found a candle and some matches and illuminated my home 19th century-style before deciding to investigate the real source of my television’s demise: Mother Nature was in a foul mood. I slipped on some boots and went outside. As if scared by a terrible shock, New England’s autumn oranges and yellows had gone white overnight. It was dark out, and still. Not a sound could be heard but the occasional crash of a falling limb. The maple tree in our frontyard was particularly stricken—it looked like a sentry standing at attention with his arms strewn about the ground. What made this storm particularly powerful was that so many leaves were still on the trees. The excessive weight of snow, sleet, ice, and foliage was forcing limbs, and in some cases, entire trees to snap with a frequency I had rarely seen. A lilac bush in our dooryard was bowed over like an ostrich, so I propped it up a bit with a step ladder and hoped that would prevent a bad snap.
I headed down Farmers Row toward the only light in the area—the emergency lights of the Buildings and Ground department. A power line was halfway down across the road. I used my cell phone to call a very busy Groton Police Department and let them know about this hazard, then I waved down an oncoming car and told the driver about the problem ahead. He was one of the guys who operates the school’s Zamboni. If you are not from this region, you may not know what a Zamboni is. What could it be? A brand name of a particularly powerful emergency generator? An efficient device for snow removal? A battery-powered coffee maker? Certainly we needed all of these devices more than a Zamboni’s true identity as a machine that re-surfaces the ice on the hockey rink. The Zamboni would not get much use today; the school’s emergency generator would have to produce power for keeping people warm rather than making ice.
At B & G, Greg Smith was just finishing shoveling the snow from in front of the building which housed the school’s boiler. Greg is one of our security officers, and he is most diligent and thoughtful. He had been listening to scanners and talking to people in town throughout the early morning. Greg is cheerful by nature, but he painted a picture of a town crippled by impassable roads, and a dark night disrupted only by transformers that had caught on fire. Talking to Greg, I felt like “The War of the Worlds” had come to Groton on this eve of Halloween.
Then, the man with the sunniest disposition at Groton came strolling up the driveway: Al McKie is second in command at B&G. He is always on call and he is always upbeat. Al had been up since 3 a.m. Despite the fact that we had lost power and some iconic trees around the campus, the only bad thing Al had to say about his morning was that he had not thought to start his coffee machine before the power went off. Not to worry, Al. Darlene Rowell, who works in the dining hall, had arrived on campus at 4:30 specifically to make sure that the people working for Buildings and Grounds could have some coffee and breakfast. Because of the weather and the roads, not everyone could make it to campus early this morning. But most of them did. Juanita Castro, who also works in the dining hall, spent two hours digging her car out and clearing her driveway. This was wet, heavy snow and Juanita is small and lithe, but she made it to campus before breakfast was served. John MacMillan is from a town a little farther north and he had 20 inches of snow in his yard. But he made it to school before the sun was up.
In describing the commitment of Groton’s teachers to Groton’s students, I frequently call them “radically accessible,” a phrase borrowed from a great middle school teacher from New York. But the people who work in our dining hall and for Buildings and Grounds are equally committed to the welfare of our community. Greg, Al, Darlene, Juanita, and John are just a few of the people who helped us get through our mini-War of the Worlds with Mother Nature during Parents Weekend and Halloween in 2011. The deep commitment of one to another, and each to the whole, was on full display at Groton School during the autumn blizzard of 2011.
