Ode To A Sleep System

(Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Snowpocalypse)

I recently bought a sleeping bag so I can start breaking it in for next year. There was never any question for even a second about what type of sleeping bag I would get. I purchased a surplus 5-piece Army modular sleep system (MSS). I’ve never owned a sleeping bag that was as comfy, warm, and easy to quickly get packed as the one the Army issued me for free. I’d like to reminisce fondly about one particular occasion where it performed admirably in a way that would have gotten it an MSM if it was an Officer. Or a hearty handshake if it was an Enlisted man.

That occasion was the epic snow and ice storm of February 2021. For those of you that weren’t living in central Texas for that fateful event, I’ll do my best to set the mood. It was a frigid President’s Day weekend and the Daytona 500 was on TV Sunday. Due to weather delays (which are all too common in Daytona in February) the race did not end until late. This was the race that was more famous for an epic final lap wreck than for the fact that Michael McDowell actually took the checkered flag. Once the race ended I turned off the TV and went to bed.

Weather reports for the last week had stressed how bad the incoming storm was going to be. Almost everyone I knew took the reports seriously, but the problem was that the city was woefully unprepared. While I slept into Monday all hell broke loose. Temperatures stayed bitterly cold and snow and ice piled up on trees. Those trees couldn’t handle the extra weight and crashed or broke, taking power lines down with them. My apartment complex lost power for this reason.

After action reports showed that experts from northern cities were baffled that Austin did so little tree maintenance in advance of the storm. In the city’s defense, there are almost never ice storms here. No one knew any better.

The lack of power meant apartments would not stay warm. As a pre-emptive measure the management company turned off everyone’s water overnight. This ultimately saved us some broken pipes, but since water mains further upstream burst we would not have had water anyway. It did save my landlord some water damage bills though, and isn’t that what’s really important?

When I awoke Monday I found that my power and water were both out. With nothing to do, I went traipsing around the area where I was living at the time. Along Metric Ave north of the Celis Brewery. It was just like a winter wonderland and every place I passed by was closed. I finally came upon an open gas station up near ACC Northridge. They had a line of cars as far as the eye could see and customers had bought all of the foodstuffs off the shelves except for some jellybeans and a few energy drinks. Pretty much my entire day was spent wandering around until I came back home and realized I was also out of foodstuffs. I ate one MetRx protein bar and decided to go to bed.

With no power it was cold as shit. It was also pitch black after 6pm. Therefore I pulled out my trusty military issue sleeping bag and crawled into it for the night. The genius of the MSS was that there were two separate bags, one thin (left below) for moderate temperatures and one thick for cooler ones. For really extreme cold weather, you could put the thin bag inside the thick bag like a cocoon.

To say it kept me warm was an understatement. I spent the entire night nice and toasty except for when I had to get up and pee into a toilet that I had no ability to flush. I figured I’d wait to fix that problem until I had to, like in the morning when I’d probably have to take a shit.

Day two the temperature was still well below freezing so no ice was melting. The morning low was 7 degrees. Since there were zero road clearing vehicles in Austin the only people brave enough to venture out were truck drivers with snow chains and stupids who were accidents waiting to happen. Our apartment building had a pool that we all started taking buckets full of water from to flush our toilets. Little Caesars not far away had their power on somehow and employees actually came in, so I was able to have a Hot N Ready pizza instead of worrying about starving to death. At sundown I crawled back into my sleeping bag and ticked off another day.

By day three it started warming up enough for ice to melt and crews were able to start fixing the utilities. That afternoon was the first time the temperature exceeded 32 degrees in over 140 hours. Those of us in the apartment complex could supplement the pool water with ice melt to keep our toilets flushed. And that night I crawled back into my sleeping bag and tried to remember what life was like with electricity and running water.

On Thursday I got my power back, which meant I could work from home again. It also meant I could run my heat so it didn’t feel like I lived inside a walk-in cooler. Most importantly, it meant I could finally watch the news and surf the internet to understand the severity of this storm and its aftermath. People died frozen in their homes. Families got hit with catastrophic electric bills due to surge pricing. Lots of people were having it way worse than me. I still had a roof over my head, power, and access to Little Caesars. However, I still slept in the same sleeping bag because I had no water and had not washed myself in almost a week.

Water was not soon to return either. As the weekend dragged on we stayed bone dry. Alternative water sources also became harder and harder to come by. The pool got emptied and all the snow melted.

Things got so bad that come Monday we actually had a local non-profit deliver a pallet-sized water container into our parking lot. Everyone used it to fill buckets and pots and pans and tumblers with precious, precious H₂O. Then a couple of days later we had another delivery of these cardboard, rectangular solid, single-serving containers of water from another non-profit. It legitimately felt like we lived in a refugee camp for a while. And the whole time all we, the tenants, could do was think of why dropping off all this water was easier than just fixing the burst pipes.

Lo and behold, on Thursday afternoon, after almost two weeks our water got turned on. The long, hot shower I took two minutes later was well inside my top ten showers ever taken. After I logged off from work I took another just because it felt so good.

Taking that shower meant I needed to finally stop using my sleep system. I’ll never forget how it saved my buns and kept them warm while the state of Texas froze. When I retired I had to turn it back in with the rest of my gear. I just hope this new MSS can provide me some small amount of the comfort my old one did. And I hope nothing remotely like 2021 happens again this winter.

Oh, and by the way, the cheap ass landlord never did refill that pool the entire time I stayed at those apartments until spring 2023.