Aside from wondering what the hell was going on, I ran through my very small catalogue of things that might’ve caused everything to just die. As you should expect, I didn’t have a clue. The only thing I could think of, and that was only because Avery had just brought it up a day earlier, was the issue of static electricity. I didn’t know what the hell it was, but it sounded good at that moment.
It was time to find Avery. My speculating was getting me nowhere.
I stood in the center of the room, trying to get my bearings. It should’ve been much easier, especially given the cramped confines of my office/bedroom, but my head was still spinning from the trauma I received from the corner of the table. I needed my clothes. For someone who had learned to become organized and always prepared for the work side of my life, I never quite managed to transfer those positive qualities to my personal life. Lucky for me, I had slovenly shed my clothes near the door earlier that night.
I was putting on my second thermal shirt when something occurred to me. The used-to-be menacing red emergency light was out. After all the sleepless nights it stops working when I could’ve actually used it. You can’t make this shit up.
Within a few minutes I was dressed and ready, minus one balaclava. I assumed Avery would get the power back up quickly. I would just find it when the lights get turned back on. Luckily, I had an old headlamp in the pocket of my parka, but, of course, the batteries were dead. The headlamp, I think, summed life up on the Patch pretty accurately: something you think should be good ends up being bad, or at least not what you expected.
Having only taken a couple steps outside, I was missing my balaclava. The wind pummeled my bare skin with wave after wave of frigid hitchhikers. I pulled the hell out of my hood strings until I looked like Kenny from South Park. A few steps later I realized the only thing the taut hood did, besides make me look ridiculous, was put undesired pressure on my head wound. It sure as hell wasn’t stopping the sleet from pelting my bare skin.
Being sleep deprived as I was, I had a bit of a manic moment. I laughed as I remembered a conversation I had with Miley years earlier. It was before East Texas. It was even before I became drill super intendent. It was right before he sent his first exploratory crew to Barrow. He wanted me to go with one of the teams that had mapped promising drilling locations in the Arctic Ocean. I had just done a winter rotation in North Dakota, so I told him I was sick of snow. He smiled at me and said, “Good. It doesn’t snow that much above the Arctic Circle.” I called bullshit on that, but he wouldn’t relent, saying, “No, seriously, it’s too cold and dry to snow in the winter months. I’m not fucking with you.” Luckily, he ended up needing me somewhere else, so I didn’t go.
Hysterics aside, it is rare for it to snow above the Arctic Circle. Under normal conditions, it’s just too cold and dry to get any appreciable precipitation. But that winter it was warm – very warm. Now when I say warm, I don’t mean pull out your tiniest thong kind of warm. It’s still cold as Titouan’s icy heart, but it wasn’t too cold to precipitate. Meteorologists marveled at how much snow had fallen and how much was still in the forecast.
***
Titouan told Avery not to sleep at the COM shack. I personally didn’t care where he slept, so I never made him sleep where he didn’t want to. That and he told me he hated sleeping there and he would quit if I made him. When I asked him what the problem was, he said he didn’t appreciate his bunkmate’s propensity for farting. His exact words were, "A grown man's affinity for releasing gas should not extend to the subconsciousness of sleep. I should not have to pay for his nocturnal, gaseous incontinence."
I mean how do you argue with that? Long story short, I knew to walk over to the COM shack rather than the nest where almost everyone else slept.
It was a brief walk over from my office, but the snowfall bizarrely worsened in those short two minutes. I could barely find the entrance it was snowing so hard. The door (the one Avery felt the need to put a “Pull” sign on after Sam pushed on it one too many times) was difficult to open because of the growing pile of drift snow in front of it. I cleared some of the snow away with my boot before trying to open it again. Once I had cleared enough to get inside, I was greeted with several loud bangs.
"Who is there?" Avery asked, sounding like a kid whose nightlight had gone out.
“It’s me.”
“You scared me. I thought you were Titouan.”
I laughed. “No, not Titouan. He’ll be here sooner than later, you can bet on that.”
Even though I knew Avery had electric lanterns, the COM shack was pitch dark. I guess he had been falling over crap looking for them, which leads us to the first thing you should know about Avery. Not only did he tend to be disheveled in appearance, he tended to be equally disorganized. Titouan and I told him to organize his workspace on numerous occasions. He obviously never got around to it.
“What the hell are you doing in here, besides clearly not keeping things organized?”
“Finally,” he said. I heard a click, and then another one. Once he was sure the flashlight wouldn’t turn on, he began to tap it with the palm of his hand. When that didn’t bring about the desired effect, he slammed
