Without Power, What?

Monday—Memorial Day—when others were gathering for barbecues or visiting relatives or playing by their pools or joining pickup games of wiffle ball, we huddled in our dark house, not watching TV or listening to Internet music. It was positively medieval. We merely sat and waited for the power to come back on. 

The Monday holiday began, as most Sundays do for us, with me starting some loads of laundry and cleaning the house and Micki working on schoolwork. The night before had been fraught with heavy storms and the electrical service had flickered and then failed for an hour or so in the small hours. I had drifted fitfully before that, worrying that the storm would uproot our giant oak or sycamore (or both). Micki said she heard the explosion of a transformer a few blocks away, but that our power had remained unaffected. I did not hear any of that. When the power failed, I flashed awake, catapulted out of the dreamless into bleak, electricity free darkness. 

We keep our room dark during the brighter half of the year by a Victorian process of drawing heavy, light blocking curtains across our windows before bedtime. A small blue digital clock in our bathroom and a similarly blue LED on our wall-mounted TV are the only sources of light in our sleeping quarters once we've turned off our bedside lamps. In the middle of the night, when the urge to use our ensuite bathroom arises (as it invariably does) we don't have to turn on a light because our dark-adapted eyes are easily able to see the room's obstacles by the pale blue wil-o-the-wisp gleam.

In the subterranean velvety blackness of our room when our house was without  power, I hit first one toe on the corner of the bed and then another on our dogs’ crate. Stifling groggy gasps of pain, I was reduced to flailing and waving my hands to find the required surfaces in the bathroom in order to manage the necessary nocturnal micturition. I then stumbled around the house to ascertain if the damage to the grid had been caused by the massive oak tree in our front yard or by any of our trees. Satisfied that someone else's big oak had caused the loss of power (this time), I headed back to bed where the silence of an electricity-free house rang in my ears like an in-person performance of a Souza march while my poor toes throbbed in 3/4 time.

As usual, our neighbors, who face the street that crosses ours (and who's back yard abuts our courtyard) still had power and, like the swell elderly folks they are, they were up at 1 in the morning with all their lights on, being way more with it than we are at half their age. That they retained power merely extended my aggravation. Nothing irritates me more, in our suburban existence, than power outages. I was further disgruntled by the fact that less than fifty feet away, people weren't suffering. They had air conditioning, the use of their electric kettle, TV and lights. I went back to bed and lay there trying to figure out if my eyes were open or closed. Later in the morning, after the sun climbed over the hills, I fell into a deep and oddly dream-filled sleep. In one of these dreams, I was straining away at an old fashioned hand-operated water pump and getting nothing but sand to pour out. 

I admit that I have been spoiled by the constant and wonderful flow of ceaseless (almost) energy that silently powers everything from our WiFi router to the electric kettle. Not for me, the taking of a basket of clothes to the creek to bang on a rock with lye powder or washing dishes by hand (oh, the humanity) or boiling oatmeal on the stove. I can load our clothes into a machine and press a button; the dishwasher is more efficient than a personal kitchen maid and the microwave makes my daily bowl of restoring oats in three minutes flat. The work is accomplished while I do other things. Not for me, either, the unjoyous rannygazoo of battling the rightful landowners of the prairie while trying to find a safe place to squat in the starlit gloom of a summer night, not worrying that I might wind up hovering over an irritable rattlesnake. Also, when we have power, I keep our house lit up like the “island” command center on an aircraft carrier. It not only fends off the burglarious chicanery of, what Margaret Thatcher in another context called “youthful hooligans” but it adds a general boost to the sense of safety for those who may wish to wander through our well-lit streets by night.

There are several reasons why power loss is so frustrating to me. The main one is that we now live in the 21st Century, where, as I recall,  we were told to expect technological conveniences on par with what cartoon men like George Jetson had as he zoomed around in a flying car and never needed to charge his handheld devices. Energy availability wasn’t questioned. We would have plenty of cheap and safe power, or so it seemed. Nothing could be less true. Today, we still connect to the grid by obviously frail and easily broken wires strung on the carcases of turpentine-covered pine trees that snap like toothpicks when the wind blows. A squirrel, doing a high wire act along one of those wires could trespass the deadly transformer and be flash broiled, plummeting 309 homes into the Dark Ages for six hours. There has to be a better way.

Last year, someone fired bullets into a substation in order to stop the proceedings of an event that offended their ‘manhood’. State officials haven’t released who these geniuses were, but apparently a .308 round fired from a high velocity rifle can disrupt the power to 2,100 citizens on a freezing January night and all we can do is throw up our hands in frustration. I think perhaps we can solidify our utilities to make them impervious to all but the most frantic weather (or dipshits). 

The second reason power loss upsets me is that my father worked for the electric company for nearly four decades and worked hard to get people their power back and I know that those workers in our area understand that haste is required. I know well that when storms cross the county, crews of electricians thick as summer mosquitoes head out in their big bucket trucks to repair the grid as quickly and safely as possible. Such crews cost the company time-and-a-half every hour they take to complete repairs. We pay a lot for uninterrupted access, it’s cost prohibitive to have to effect speedy repairs after big storms. These are excellent reasons to reinforce the grid against weather.

Pop Bare was often on call and sometimes had to head home from gatherings or church or leave off mowing the yard to put on his work clothes and go help get other people's power back on, especially when weather was a factor. They knew that the people depended on them for power often had lifesaving equipment or necessary electronically powered gizmos, the loss of which could mean loss of life or property. In his neighborhood in those days, electrical service was primarily underground and so not susceptible to tree limbs and drunken drivers. He knew that he performed a nevertheless necessary and essential service.

Pop and his crew worked hard both at upkeep of the grid and also at emergency repair. They could get the power back flowing in just a few hours way back then. In our current age of AI weather predictions and radar models that can forecast twenty hurricane paths, you would think that a neighborhood like ours, where the streets are lined with ancient trees, would be a prime location for a prepared crew to await the devastation. They could literally set up shop on any one of our streets or in the seemingly endless supply of church parking lots and be within two minutes travel to begin sorting things out. Yet, they still operate by a model of waiting to schedule a crew until damage is reported. I have never understood this. If they aren’t going to strengthen the grid, they ought to at least have ‘special forces’ teams waiting on the ground most likely to be affected. I’m glad to open our home to a group of electricians if it means getting them on their way to the fallen oak tree and downed lines faster.

One good thing is that our house meter now reports through instant flash that power is interrupted. They updated all the houses in our community over the course of six months (but didn't tell us) and so one clear day in February, after Micki had gone to work and I was earnestly soaping the crust in the shower, the power went off. Slick with suds, I crept out to see what the fuss was and observed a worker replacing the meter immediately outside our bedroom windows. Clutching at my robe like a blushing hotsy-totsy in a pulp romance novel, I popped open the window and asked what the matter was. The man looked at me, apparently startled by the peninsula of shampoo foam rolling steadily down my forehead and told me that they were changing out our meter. He explained the purpose and then, with rather less than the milk of human kindness one might expect from a man who had disconnected power without notifying me first, said it would be about ten minutes before the lights came on. I wrote a terse letter to the power company that week. My eyes were still burning from the shampoo.

On Memorial Day, with a load of clothes in each of our washers and one load in the dryer and while I was chirruping along to upbeat tunes as I vacuumed, a tree on a main artery road just two blocks from us, karate chopped a telephone pole in half and killed power for 135 electric bill-paying residents. The power company sent texts within minutes to alert us and keep us posted (far better than in previous years) but the serious damage meant that we would be without power for up to seven hours.

My groovy elderly neighbor consolingly said, as I scooped storm debris from the pool, that our ancestors did without power for generations, so we can manage for a few hours. That was easy for him to say while his power was still on. Also, our ancestors didn't know any better. They had derived means of living without power because they had no other options. Once electricity flowed into their neighborhoods and homes, they got appliances that ran on power and never looked back. My well-meaning (and very hip) neighbor is nevertheless correct. Although I don't think I have lived anywhere where we lost power so often (including in the three-hundred year-old house in rural Pennsylvania when I was a kid) it is a hardship on par with forgetting one's belt; hardly a nightmare. More an inconvenience.

During an ice storm in the early 2000s which left us without power for three days, some people out in the county had to manage with no electricity for two weeks. One friend at that time who lived out in the county boonies had to resort to boiling water and throwing out loads of recently bought food and going without heat or hot water for showers. Their septic system backed up and their well failed. We were the lucky ones in that scenario. In recent years, the power loss caused by hurricanes has been quite a discomfort and this year is going to be a terrible one for the big sea storms, or so they are telling us.

Our son and his wife have a house that is located well off the main road, up a winding dirt lane and down a muddy track that leads to their seven-acre fairyland. Out in those wilds, power loss is as regular and expected as sunburn at the summer pool party. They have a propane-powered generator that kicks in within seconds of a loss of power. During a visit a few years ago, a series of nasty storms blew across the mountains downed trees and caused flash floods and mud and rock slides. We cozily watched DVDs and cooked using their air fryer as if nothing was wrong.

True to their word, the power company got the grid repaired (at least temporarily) a little before their predicted deadline. We were up late working on laundry that ought to have been done hours before. We cooked hotdogs on the grill and settled before the TVin the relative coolness of a newly engaged air-conditioning system. Our plans to sit by the pool and play yard games were ruined but we made the most of the day by reverting briefly to a more primitive lifestyle. 

I have often promoted an idea that, like our ancestors, there is something to be honored in the old ways. To squall about not having power is in direct antithesis to those sentiments. I acknowledge the hypocrisy. It is mainly that our lives have now been ordered to fit a post industrialized world. Like all resources on our small planet, if someone stands to make a buck, we will have to pay if we want to enjoy those benefits. Electricity, which is a natural resource, is generated and maintained and sold to us (at a premium) by companies that hold the valve. The least they could do, for what we pay over the course of a thirty year residence, is prevent all but the most devastating interruptions. That would be a return on investment that would make the electric bill feel a little less like highway robbery.

I'm not ignorant of the fact that thousands of people in many places across our globe are suffering the effects of war, genocide and irredentist ideology. They'd just be happy to have a cup of tea without their ears ringing with rocket fire. They certainly deserve it, but they might be a little sad to hear that even in the blessedly safe and quiet leafy suburban streets of smalltown NC, we periodically have to deal with power loss that could be prevented with a little forethought by the power companies.

Forget flying cars and transporters, I'd be happy if we could just eliminate interruptions to the power grid without having to pay scads for a natural gas generator. Not to be cynical, we're quite lucky to be able to have all that we have, even when the power goes out. Our oak didn't fall (this time) and our house was spared storm damage. Someday we may zoom around like George Jetson, but for now, I can hope that power outages will be a thing of the past, soon. That's what I would call shocking (but acceptable) leap forward.