Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [151]
The residential streets of Georgetown were a surprise to Frank. He had never walked around, or even driven in, this part of town, and it was like being transported to some quaint and comfortable old quarter of a northern European town. Colorful, neat, handmade, human scale—the streets were like what Main Street in Disneyland had always hoped to suggest, much more real of course, but still, toylike. Like the village in a snow-filled paperweight. He would have to return and check it out under more normal circumstances.
The sky overhead was unlike that in any paperweight, dark with smoke that streamed in fat bands all across the sky. A huge population lived hidden in the forest around the city, and nearly every single fireplace must have had a blaze in it; and a certain percentage had gone wrong and burned down their houses and added their greater smokes to the chimney fires, so that now the sky was streaked with black, and flakes of ash drifted down, lighter than snowflakes. Frank’s nose kept him from smelling the smoke, but he could taste it as grit on his tongue, a little acrid. He wondered if he would ever be able to smell again.
A fire truck wailed down Wisconsin, and the firemen in it jumped out and ran a pump and hose line down to the Potomac. It took some awkward work with chainsaws to break through the ice covering the river, which was now a big white sheet from bank to bank. A crowd gathered to watch and cheer, their breath frosting over them in a small cloud. Sputter and roar of a big Honda generator powering up, downshift as the pump motor was engaged, a moment of suspense while nothing happened; then the flattened hose bulked like a snake swallowing a mouse, and water shot out of the big nozzle held by two firemen, who quickly secured it to a stand and aimed the white flow at the leading edge of their blaze. The crowd cheered again. Spray flying upward from the jet of water had time to freeze in the air, flocking the nearby rooftops with the kind of snow one saw at ski resorts. A tall black man grinned hugely at Frank: “They froze that fire.”
Late in the day Frank went back down to the Potomac to walk out on the ice. Scores of people had had the same idea. It had happened the same way in London two weeks before, and all over the world people had seen images of the grand festival the Londoners had spontaneously thrown, celebrating the freeze in the Elizabethan style. Now on the Potomac people were mostly standing around or skiing, playing football or soccer ad hoc versions of curling. One or two wore ice skates and glided through the crowd, but most were slipping around in boots or their ordinary shoes. A hotdog-cart man was busy selling out his entire stock. The ice on the river was usually white but here and there was as clear as glass, the moving black water visible below. It was freaky at first to walk on these clear sections, but even big groups and giant leaps into the air did not cause a shudder in the ice, which looked from the occasional hole chopped in it to be about two foot thick, maybe more.
When sunset slanted redly across the Potomac the light struck Frank like another vision out of Brueghel. One of his Flemish winter canal scenes, except most of the Washington, D.C., population was black. Out here on the river you could finally see that in a way that Northwest and Arlington never revealed. It was like Carnavale on ice, the celebrants improvising clothing that was warm enough to keep them out there, which then became costumes too. A giant steel drum band added to the Caribbean flavor. Snowfights and slip-and-slides, break dancing and curling that was more like bowling, touch football, tackle football, it all was happening out there between Virginia and the District, on this sudden new terrain. In the fading light the whole world took on a smoky red cast, the river