Читать книгу Prison Puzzle Pieces 3 - Dave Basham - Страница 51

One of my worst experiences was when I was assigned to work tower 7 on a day that started out over 20 degrees below zero with a strong wind blowing. I guess that would actually be the opposite of hell. I dressed warm, but there was no way to keep warm in these conditions. There was no heat. The radiator was colder than ice.

Speaking of ice, I had brought a bottle of water to drink. It froze in about 10 minutes, so I had nothing to drink during my roughly 0615 to 1415 shift in this tower.

The front window frame in this tower had either deteriorated or been busted out before I started here. An old section of window in a flimsy metal frame had been fastened over part of it at the top; scrap plywood covered the rest. Because this make shift window wasn’t fastened all the way around, the wind was blowing it up several inches and the cold wind was blowing in. There were newspapers lying around in the tower, so I tried cramming some of them in the gap. The wind just blew the window out even further. Some of the papers flew around in the yard and some flew over the wall. I guess if anyone would’ve come out in this cold weather and seen those papers come out of my tower, I would’ve been in trouble for trying to keep from freezing.

Inmates were kept inside the prison out of the extreme cold until late into my shift when the light of day got the temperature up to around zero. A few inmates stepped out, but only for a short time. I think they just wanted to play macho to the other inmates; the ones that had the sense to stay indoors.

If I would’ve had to use a rifle, I doubt that I could’ve handled it well enough to do any good as my fingers were frozen along with my toes.

Towers are boring enough when the weather was nice, much less having to deal with trying to stay functional in these extreme conditions.