A slow struggle out of darkness
For one town, shelter is spirit of community
HARVARD - Clayton Guyett, 84, has seen the aftermath of battles in the Pacific from a US Navy hospital ship in World War II, and the destruction wrought by fearsome storms as a boy growing up on the New York-Canada border. But he'd never seen anything like the ice storm that turned this bucolic town of country roads and sprawling farm houses into a tangle of broken trees and downed power lines, and made his home on East Bare Hill Road cold, dark, isolated, and uninhabitable.
That was Friday. Yesterday, Guyett was hunkered down at the makeshift shelter at the Bromfield School, sleeping on a cot, dining on school lunch fare, breathing from the oxygen tank required by his pulmonary disease and other ailments. He and his wife, Emily, 82, had no idea when they would be able to go home to the hospital-style bed that gives him comfort, to the Volvo station wagon that's stuck in the frozen mire in their yard, to the wreckage of branches and trunks.
Harvard yesterday was still a disaster. Churches were closed, town offices were shuttered, and lights were dark in the Harvard General Store.
As work crews from as far away as Ohio cleared away fallen power lines and busily strung together replacements, dozens of families huddled with the Guyetts at the Bromfield School, waiting for the power to go back on line, and with it, their lives. And as they waited, they have come together.
High school students worked as emergency medical technicians, the town assessor whipped up garlic bread and fruit crisps in the school cafeteria, local merchants donated supplies, and neighbors helped neighbors clear yards strewn with torn branches and jagged tree trunks.
"It's a pull-together kind of thing, everyone is pitching in to help us out," Emily Guyett said.
The experience in Harvard - the stunning destruction from the storm, followed by the massive cleanup effort mixed with the small acts of neighborly kindness - is one that is repeating itself through wide swaths of Central and Western Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
From the twisted remains of trees and branches it looked as though Harvard had been hit by a hurricane, if not an aerial bombardment. Gusts had topped out just short of 50 miles per hour during the worst of the storm, according to the National Weather Service. It was the combination of those winds and freezing rain that brought down the trees, said Edward Denmark, chief of police in this small town about 30 miles west of Boston.
People here remember the Blizzard of '78 with a certain fondness: Sure, everything was closed back then, too, but they had heat and light; at least back then they could stay in their homes.
Not this time.
"I thought I could ride it out, but I couldn't," said 72-year-old John Larochelle, who figured he was hale enough to ignore the police when they came by early in the storm and warned him to leave. When they came by a second time, it was 35 degrees in his apartment on Stow Road. He gladly took the ride to the school, where he sat on a simple cot yesterday in the cafeteria.
More cots filled corridors for the several dozen people who have been staying at the school, which is attended by the town's students in grades 6 through 12. Many more townspeople have been checking in for the food, warmth, and company of the cafeteria, where children played checkers and Stratego and adults read newspapers donated by the general store. People swapped stories of the storm with neighbors and waited for the news that they could go home.
"Progress is being made in restoring power," a sign written in chalk on a blackboard assured them, with the warning: "All wires should be treated as live." The note had been written Sunday. Yesterday Denmark said main power lines could be up throughout the town by today.
On Stow Road, a crew from the New River Electrical Corp., based in Cloverdale, Va., worked from trucks and cherry pickers to string together the main power line between Harvard and Boxborough. They had been called in from Columbus, Ohio, on Saturday, and had driven 17 hours to get here, said Karl Mattila, one of the workers. The damage in Harvard was bad, he said, though he'd seen worse. His men were working as fast as they could, he added. His family back home had told him an ice storm was bearing down on Columbus.
"We'd like to finish what we're doing here and get back," he said.
At the shelter, Caitlin Nygren, 17, a senior at the Bromfield School, was signing in townspeople. She has been pulling double shifts with a team of EMTs drawn partially from a town training program for high school students.
Early Friday, Nygren had responded to an emergency three miles from the center of town. It took two hours to get there, as firemen hacked away at branches and trunks clogging the roads, taking care to avoid the power lines. They got there in time - she refused to say what the emergency was - "but it was kind of nerve-wracking."
Since then, she said, "I haven't really slept at home."
On the north side of Route 2 in Harvard, electricity had been restored. The Dunkin' Donuts had so many customers yesterday morning that it ran out of doughnuts, prompting one of the few signs of impatience with the rate of recovery from customers who had come to whet their desire for Boston kreme or pumpkin glazed after four days of going without. A few trays of muffins and a lonely tray of Munchkins were all that was left.
Halsey Berryman, who works at the shop, said her house north of Route 2 had light, water, and heat, and lacked only cable and Internet.
Jim Esselstyn was one Harvard resident south of Route 2 who had everything pretty much working in his home on Bolton Road. About a decade ago he had decided after a bad storm to get a generator to power his water, heat, and light in an emergency. So he and his wife, Marie, were able to stay home when the electricity went off.
But they hadn't been prepared for the trees. Fourteen of them fell, some in their neighbors' yards. Yesterday they worked, their coats dirty with mud, to clear up the mess.
"What we worry about now," Jim Esselstyn said, "is that before we can clean this up we'll get two feet of snow!"
David Filipov can be reached at filipov@globe.com
Correction: Because of a reporting error, a Page One story on Tuesday about residents of Harvard coping with the aftermath of last week's devastating ice storm misstated the town's distance from Boston. It is about 30 miles. 