Ice Cap
Authors: Chris Knopf
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To the Polish.
An accomplished and underappreciated people.
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Acknowledgments
My greatest debt in the making of this book is to the Polish people who supplied so much useful information on Polish food, festivities, family dynamics, names, places, and cultural nuance, both here in Southampton and New Britain, Connecticut, and in the old country. Notably, Pawel Bula and Adrian Kecki. Matters of the law were managed by my crack legal team: Norman Bloch, Cindy Courtney and Rich Orr, and their law student son, Andy Orr. Paige Goettel handled French duties, with some excellent assistance from Mark Bonnet, who also advised on technology issues. Dr. Peter King told me how to kill someone by inducing a heart attack, and get away with it. Don't mess with either of us. Nancy Dugan gave me a native's guide to Carnegie Hill and the Upper East Side of New York City. If you notice inaccuracies in any of these renderings, the fault is all mine, not my advisers'. My staff of pre-submission readers, Randy Costello, Bob Willemin, Mary Jack Wald, and Sean Cronin, performed their usual editorial magic, this time under a very tight deadline. Anne-Marie Regish threw in her usually stellar logistical support, and Mary Farrell continues to endure the relentless imposition of her husband's literary compulsions.
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Contents
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1
It would have been the blizzard of the century if a bigger one hadn't hit a few weeks later. But for the people of the Hamptons marooned in the off-off season of mid-January, it was like we'd been plucked from the end of Long Island and dropped into the Arctic Circle.
For me, it was another opportunity to praise my Volvo station wagon, both steadfast and true, no matter how little maintenance or care I remembered to bestow upon it. That evening the biggest challenge was identifying the car among the other giant heaps of rapidly building snow in the parking lot behind my apartment. I was only out there because I got a call from one of my clients, Franklin Delano Raffini, aka Francoâan exâinvestment banker who'd served time for killing his girlfriend's husband with a rotisserie skewer before the husband could kill him with a steak knife.
“You gotta get over here, Jackie,” he said via cell phone, the words barely audible over the wind noise.
“Not the best time,” I said.
“Don't tell anybody anything till you get here. I'm serious. You'll see why.”
Another complicating factor was my complete lack of personal preparedness. Snow was hardly unheard of in the Hamptons, but it was usually nothing like this. The best I could do was cowboy boots, black leather gloves that went nearly to the elbow (bought for more heated circumstances), a leotard, jeans, and lots of layers under my orange barn jacket.
I thought I'd overdone it until I hit the outside air and felt like the skin on my face was being cryogenically removed. I found the car and dug my way to the driver's-side door with an old aluminum fry pan. Inside the car somewhere was an ice scraper. From the driver's seat, I climbed into the back and dug the scraper out from under a stack of file folders, a pair of jumper cables, a box of Kleenex, a birdcage, a beach umbrella last used five months before, golf clubs never used, and other unrelated items whose origins had been lost in the mists of time.
When I finally finished clearing about two feet of snow off the car with the fry pan and scraper, another inch or two had already started to form. The engine had been running, however, so the defrosters and wipers kept the glass clear. The greater issue was the most fundamentalâcould I really drive in this stuff?
Even if snowplows had been as prevalent on Long Island as they were in Buffalo, there was no way to keep up with the snowfall. So the only choice wasn't driving over, it was driving through.
At least I'd been taught by my father how to handle a car in the snow. He had his faults, but denying his daughter instruction in the many things he thought her too stupid to master on her own was not one of them. So whenever a snowstorm hit the area, however meager the accumulation, we'd venture forth in one of his ungainly American land yachts for a lesson, which was usually delivered in harsh and condescending tones, just to ensure that even an effort to preserve my safety would be remembered with a tinge of hollow disappointment.
The first trick was to go easy on the gas pedal, refraining at all times from spinning the wheelsâa circumstance from which, my father impressed upon me, it was virtually impossible to recover. That day, I thought the whole thing was impossible, so I was more surprised than triumphant when I felt the car move forward out of the parking spot, across the lot, and out into the street.
From there it was a short hop to Montauk Highway, the main east-west thoroughfare that connected the string of villages that comprised the Hamptons, and thus the only road the authorities were committed to keeping as clear as possible. This meant that successive plow passes during the day had formed a small mountain ridge at the end of my side street. As my father had taught me, this circumstance called for an opposing strategy: drop to a lower gear and hit the gas.
I felt it was every bit as unlikely that I'd be able to smash my way through a wall of snow as it was getting under way in the first place, which is probably why I didn't consider the consequences of success until I found myself in the middle of Montauk Highway, perpendicular to the flow of traffic and directly in the path of a very large pickup. I cranked the steering wheel hard to the right and kept power to the wheels, allowing me to spin the rear of the car into the opposite snowbank, just barely avoiding an ugly collision. For its part, the truck swerved a few times, the edge of the yellow plow whispering past the side of the Volvo and then swinging back into the mass of snow that entombed a row of cars along the curbside.
“Idiot,” I said to myself for a variety of reasons, including the fact that I was now irrevocably lodged inside the packed snow.
I looked in my mirror and saw a woman in heavy coveralls, about the same color of my barn jacket, jump out of the truck and slip-slide toward me through the swirling haze. I rolled down the passenger-side window and prepared myself for a well-deserved rebuke.
“Are you all right?” she asked, looking anxiously through the open window. Her long brown hair, streaked with gray, was salted with snowflakes, and her angular, dark face was lit up with concern.
“I should be asking you,” I said. “I did a really dumb thing.”
“Everybody's dumb in a snowstorm. You stuck?”
“Oh, yeah. How would you feel about pulling me out?”
“I'd feel fine about it,” she said. “Don't go anywhere till I get back.”
She jogged back to her truck, jumped in, did a three-point turn, and drove a short way past me. Then she got a chain out of the truck bed and hooked us up. She gestured for me to roll down my window again.
“Just help me along with some gentle acceleration. No stunt driving necessary.”
“What's your name?” I asked.
“Dayna Red. I tell people it's a house paint. Nobody believes me.”
I told her my name and profession: counsel to the region's impoverished miscreants or merely misled, one of whom had sent me an urgent call that I felt irresistibly compelled to answer.
“Not in this weather you aren't,” she said.
“What if I hired you?” I asked her.
“Plow job?”
“Escort. I need to get over to Seven Ponds in Southampton.”
She leaned into the car, bringing some more of the storm with her. A white dust started to form on the accretion of papers, soda cans, and empty cigarette packs that filled the passenger seat.
“I just came from over there. They haven't plowed yet.”
I wrote the address on a handy piece of paper.
“You know where that is?” I asked her.
She studied the paper.
“Sure. Tad Buczek's place. Metal Madness.”
Metal wasn't the only thing mad about Tad, but it figured largely. Like my late husband's familyâthe honorable SwaitkowskisâTad's family had made the calculation that tens of millions of dollars in hand from real-estate developers was better than bushels of potatoes you had to go to the trouble of growing, harvesting, and selling into a saturated market. Tad's share of the bounty was substantialâenough for him to retain fifteen acres of mixed fields and woodlands for himself, on which he established one of the more irregular local homesteads, even by the rigorous standards of the Hamptons.
Always a connoisseur of large agricultural machinery, Tad harnessed his new wealth to embark on a major acquisition program, focusing on earth-moving equipment, until his property was littered with backhoes and bulldozers, excavators, dump trucks, and articulated haulers. Zoning disputes quickly erupted, led by some of Tad's new neighbors, the wealthy owners of colonial-style and postmodern mini-mansions that rose up from his family's former potato farm.
Tad eventually reached a settlement, which in my former life as a real-estate lawyer I helped draft, and which required him to store his earth-mover collection within a pair of huge pre-fabbed steel buildings designed to enclose things like assembly lines and commercial aircraft. The deal was sealed when he sited the buildings within a grove of pine trees deep inside the property, thus rendering the entire operation essentially invisible.
What his opponents hadn't figured on was Tad's purpose in acquiring the earth-moving equipment in the first place, which wasn't simply to warehouse a fleet of lumbering machines but rather to apply them to the purpose for which they'd been originally engineered.
Moving earth.
The land, cleared of the offending eyesores, was soon in the midst of a massive transformation. Out of acres of flat, unobstructed potato fields grew huge hills, plateaus, pyramids, and berms that circled into themselves like ancient fortifications. Much of this required massive infusions of fill, which meant a steady procession of dump trucks importing sand, gravel, and rough soil from as far away as North Jersey.
Another flood of lawsuits resulted, but there was little the neighbors could do about this one. There was no law or statute prohibiting the physical alteration of a person's private land, provided it had no negative impact on the adjacent environment, water supply, or septic systems. Offenses Tad studiously avoided.
Better yet, the work was done in fairly short orderâbarely six monthsâafter which Tad set to growing grass and planting trees and bushes on his freshly terraformed estate, softening the edges of the artificial earthen shapes until they took on the character of a naturally molded landscape, one of such verdant beauty that any complaint seemed fatuous at best.
The subsequent goodwill helped Tad weather the next explosion of outrage.
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“I'll have to put the plow down when we turn on David Whites Lane,” said Dayna after pulling me out of the snowbank and walking back to my car. She asked for my cell phone number. “I'll call you, and we'll keep the connection open. Keep it on speaker. Better than a walkie-talkie.”
The snowfall might have abated some as the sky above darkened to a deep, sooty gray. But snow still filled the air, blown into a chaotic frenzy by the increasing wind. That was one of the costs of living close to the ocean. Whatever lousy weather you could have out here, the wind always made it that much lousier.