Well, most of the issue was the ice storm. Worst since ’68, in my reckoning – and I was just a little kid back then and my grandpa said he’d never seen it so bad in all his years. Every tree turned into an ice bomb, branches and trunks snapping lines across town so fast you could hardly hear yourself shout over it.
But we were ready to pick up and start piecing things back together once it left. The second storm actually HELPED with that – all that warm midnight rain. Except it was a thunderstorm, and well, wouldn’t you know it, lightning went and hit the sewage plant. Talk about unlucky! And what were the odds that it would start a fire? The storm drains were overloaded from all the water to begin with, now we had a town full of downed power lines, falling tree branches, and spreading sewage slicks. Which was probably why the second ice storm made things so much worse – it froze a lot of things to the ground we’d rather have been able to remove. It also turns out it’s hard for an arborist truck to brake and turn carefully over black ice made of ‘sewer grease,’ who knew? Certainly not the guy driving the cherry-picker that crashed through town hall and put the mayor in a body cast. Oh boy, that sure slowed down coordination of relief efforts a bit, I’ll tell you what.
After that a lot of the emergency repair crews took it slow, which meant more time without power, which meant even more stuff in fridges and freezers going bad, which meant more garbage going out, which meant the raccoons and possums were well fed enough to have leisure time, which they used to master fire and confederate under a Trash Lord. And THAT meant the garbage guys had to go and deal with that immediately, because if you don’t get in there fast before they establish a line of succession – or (god forbid) elected government –you’re looking at a federal-level issue. So everyone was still making a lot of trash but nobody had time to pick it up because they were trying to get squirrel wetworks teams to get a hit on a possum, and the trash was just piling up in everyone’s garages. This created lots of bad vibes, which resonated with each other, sunk into the bedrock, and deharmonized our local skeleton sedimentary layer. Half of the town’s on Precambrian granite, so that was safe (you can’t get ghosts from igneous rocks any easier than you can wring water from them), but the south edge is all limestone from the Ordovician, which on the plus side meant most of the angry risen fossilized dead come to roam the surface weren’t actually SKELETONS per se because most of them were things like trilobites, molluscs, brachiopods – you know, invertebrates. And the odd sea scorpion which boy howdy let me tell you did NOT make anyone happier to go outside. Nobody died, but some of them committed property damage, some of them kept people up all night, some of them got embroiled in local politics and sided for and against the Trash Lord… it just was one more big headache in a week of big headaches, one more damned thing. So really everything EQUALLY led to the town’s psychic reservoir overtopping and eroding containment, this was just the last straw.
Now, I know that reservoir was put together with the very best and most modern designs and the finest materials money could buy, but that was in the seventies. The early seventies. I’m not pointing fingers, but if I had to, I’d point them at the budgetary decisions in subsequent decades, not the initial planners. We had a good thing handed down to us and we didn’t do due diligence in keeping it healthy, which is why our own fitful nightmares slid free of it and filled our lives with imagined horrors, leading to us running screaming from our beds into the night and colliding with torn trees, fallen wires, angry Paleozoic ghosts, militant bands of marsupial and placental wildlife, and black ops garbagemen kill squads. While sliding on ice made of sewage.
You know, I don’t like to complain, I really don’t, but I feel like it was really unfair for the media to call it a ‘shit-storm.’ The shit was a third order knock-on effect at best, and even if it DID get into the drinking water a bit that didn’t cause half as many problems as the subsequent contamination of the lake with metajungian fluids, catalyzing it into a collective unconsciousness driven by a series of obtuse and mystical archetypes that it didn’t understand or want because it was a body of water and sediments and thereby causing it to defend itself by counter-flooding the town.
This was a major problem, because the racoons and opossums had turned most of the city trash bins into fortified strongholds by then and they discovered they could float. I don’t know if you’ve read up on Mahanian naval doctrine yourself, but they figured it out on their own pretty fast and before afternoon hit they’d neutralized most of the city’s water-capable vehicles with molotovs (siphoned from lawnmowers and snowblowers, mostly) and had free control of the water, granting them rapid-access deployment to anywhere in the city. This display of power clearly elevated the Trash Lord to a Trash Duke, which automatically granted them authority over all nearby bears, which automatically granted the Primary Reserve the authority and duty to take command and use all available force to suppress the threat, which they did by automatically deploying a hypersonic dog whistle in the opera house’s basement, which had (unfortunately) suffered water damage and just sort of howled uncontrollably in a human-audible pitch that made everyone weep black tears and see things. It also made the bears speak the tongues of man to say really nasty and hurtful things AND then on top of that they started trying to summon demons and although that didn’t work too well because as I said previously we’re on limestone and granite here they DID also start setting fires, which wasn’t too good because although the town was flooded it also had a lot of little outboard-motor-using trash bin boats floating around running on volatile mixes of whatever they could siphon.
Yeah, it wasn’t great. The main flotilla got caught down on Main Street when the traffic lights fell over and blocked escape to the harbour and boy you could smell the burning fur for blocks, it was just awful, just awful. But it WAS food and the seagulls down by the harbour got curious and ate it and well it turns out some of it wasn’t cooked through and they got racoon roundworms in them, which normally would be a big deal on account of long-term neurological damage to the host but in this case was problematic because the mass suffering from the trash fleet was also big enough to cause a half-proper demonic offering and incarnated some sort of embodiment of despair into the roundworms, causing them to spontaneously overrun their hosts in a dang gruesome flurry of nematodes and merge into a worm-king gull bigger than the clock tower which tore the roof off the supermarket and started eating all the spoiled food from when the trash flotilla siphoned their backup generators to make explosives. And THAT meant the Primary Reserve had to initiate another automatic countermeasure, which turned out to be cloud seeding with blessed table salt to create a holy water rainstorm, only due to the complicated patterns of heat and moisture coming off the fire, floods, and ice (physical AND metaphysical) it made some sort of tornado instead, which carried away the ghosts, the nightmares, the bears, the worm-king gull, and the entire lake, plus the supermarket. That actually helped a lot but when all was said and done it turned out the Trash Duke was the highest ranking official left in town with full use of all four limbs so they promoted themselves to Trash Mayor and started passing decrees.
Since then, it’s been mostly okay. Mixed blessings, you know? We’ve got the branches off the lines and the lines off the ground and we cleaned up the sewage and the power’s NEARLY back on, but our new town hall is the garbage dump and you can’t legally serve on the council unless you’re covered in fur and have tiny little paws that look like hands.
Still, it’s really a very pretty little town most of the year. You’ve just caught us at a bad time, that’s all.