My Life and Times

Across the harbor from Boston, a number of houses in the frigid community of Hull were coated with ice in the wake of a blizzard that left as much as 38 inches of January 25, 2005Storm Leaves Boston Struggling With Another Big DigBy PAM BELLUCK WAYLAND, Mass., Jan. 24 - Gary Burton, the Wayland superintendent of schools, insists that his having grown up in Newfoundland is not the reason he decided to open the schools Monday in this western suburb of Boston.So what if almost every other school district in eastern Massachusetts was closed, grappling with the aftermath of a blizzard that left much of the region nearly paralyzed by hip-deep snow, blistering winds and biting cold?"It's New England," Dr. Burton said. "It's going to snow."But even in this hardy community, where parents are well aware that the schools rarely close, the weekend's ferocious northeaster was too much for many."A number of parents have called to tell me that I guessed wrong," Dr. Burton acknowledged. "It's running about 60-40 against me today. Mostly it seems to center around road conditions. And some of the town's sidewalks have not been plowed, so some children are forced to walk in the roads, which I agree they should not be doing. Some parents are also asking, if all these other schools have closed, what do I know that they don't know. I do think there are some parents who - well, today I'm not one of their favorite people."In most places in the region, from Boston to Hyannis to Gloucester, communities capitulated to the elements: schools, courts, government offices and many businesses remained shut."We just can't handle it," said Bob Burns, the emergency management operations officer for the town of Plymouth, which tied with Salem for the most snow in the state: 38 inches, according to the National Weather Service."Our plows and stuff just can't move this kind of stuff around," Mr. Burns said. "We've had a lot of our equipment get stuck. We called in the National Guard to use front-end loaders to move the snow - heavy, heavy equipment."Mr. Burns said that while much of the state had gotten light, fluffy snow, Plymouth and some other coastal areas had been hit by the heavy, wet variety, which snapped power lines and left some people without heat, forced to take refuge in an emergency shelter.On Cape Cod, smothered with three feet of snow and with conditions so dire that for the first time in memory The Cape Cod Times did not publish a newspaper on Monday (it did turn out an online edition), Adrienne Morosini, Dana Heilman and their two children were still trapped in their house in Harwich as of Monday afternoon.Twelve years of experience on the Cape had taught them that "usually it doesn't snow that much, and if it does it melts pretty quickly," Ms. Morosini, a real estate agent, said by telephone.Anyway, their four-wheel-drive vehicles are usually able to navigate any snow that falls. But, Ms. Morosini said, "our driveway is about 500 yards long, and the snowdrifts in some places are eight feet tall.""We don't have a regular plow guy," she said. "We made calls, and now we're just begging people to come and get us."They put a sign at the end of their driveway: "Plow for Money," with their phone number. And they hunkered down, glad that unlike Sunday, this was a day with electricity and heat. Boston, meanwhile, where the temperature was as low as 3 degrees early Monday morning, was a frigid white labyrinth, with shoveled sidewalks wedged alongside mountains of snow. On fashionable Newbury Street, where crossing pedestrians needed to scale a three-foot-high snowbank to get to the sidewalk, Elissa Bjorck, 19, was at work at Jasmine Sola, a clothing store selling spring-break attire: bikinis, sun hats and a hot-pink sleeveless dress.Only one customer showed up Monday morning, but "people have come in here just to keep warm," Ms. Bjorck said.The extreme weather resulted in at least one death in Massachusetts. The Boston Police Department said a 10-year-old boy from the Roxbury section died of carbon monoxide poisoning Sunday after sitting in a running parked car whose tailpipe was blocked by piled-up snow and ice.Logan Airport, closed for nearly 30 hours beginning Sunday morning, reopened but was then hounded by an hourlong electrical failure that stopped elevators and escalators and slowed passenger check-in to a crawl.And on Nantucket, where the entire island lost power on Sunday and many were still without electricity Monday, about 100 people were staying at an emergency shelter at the high school.A family with a 10-month-old baby took refuge at the shelter after winds blew the glass out of their storm door Sunday."That's how I got out," said the baby's mother, who did not want to give her name. "I climbed through the broken glass. The drifts made it impossible otherwise. I couldn't open the door."Sasha Cavender contributed reporting from Nantucket for this article, and Katie Zezima from Boston