The Village Idiot: Less power may be coming to you
The thunder was getting closer, there were lightning flashes off in the distance. I shut down my computer. I can’t afford to lose all the notes I’ve taken since making a backup a week ago. Oh, yeah, I mean six or seven months ago. If the lightning doesn’t fry the hard disk, it might knock a branch off a tree and pull down a power line. Here on the farm, power interruptions are pretty commonplace. We’re without power for an hour or two at least once a month.
Last winter during an ice storm it was off for three days in a row. I kept calling the power company to see when they were going to have it fixed and they kept making up answers. Finally, on the third day, I wasn’t taking no for an answer. I somehow got a supervisor. She said, “Sir, have you ever considered getting a generator?”
I said, “Yes, I have. And I’ve considered sending you the bill for it.”
Most of our neighbors have power generators, basically gasoline powered lawn mower engines that plug into the electrical system of their house. Well, not the house, it’s usually hooked up to the dairy barn and, if there’s any power left over, then the house. But home-sized generators burn about a gallon of gas an hour. We ended up without electricity for 72 hours. I can see owning a generator when you live nearly off the grid, but I can’t see having 72 gallons of gasoline hanging around the house. It’s hard enough to lift the five-gallon can, I’m sure I couldn’t tip a 72 gallon can without making a big mess.
The good news was that when the electricity went out, so did the heating system and the water pump. So we didn’t lose any food from the refrigerator or the freezer. We just stacked it all in the dining room. Then we went and rented a motel room.
This never happened to us when we lived in the city. Except for a major blackout every 20 years or so, we had all kinds of dependable power. Just because there was a thunderstorm didn’t mean I had to run around turning off every appliance in the house. Yes, we had plenty of power.
In the city things didn’t work for all kinds of other reasons. A guy jumps on the subway tracks, so four million people are two hours late. There’s a disabled car in the right lane, so 50,000 people don’t make it to the airport on time. The elevator’s out of service, so we have to walk up seven flights to visit the heart doctor. The wind blew over a construction crane, there’s a drawbridge operator’s strike, there’s a doorman strike, there’s a garbage strike, there’s a cab driver’s strike. Some days it seemed the only people in the city that hadn’t gone on strike were the panhandlers.
This spring a disturbed tobacco farmer drove a tractor into a pond in Washington, D.C., and threatened to blow himself up. He tied up traffic for three days. Locals had plenty of power to watch the standoff with police on TV. They were watching at home with plenty of power because there was no way they could get to work.
The random power outages of the country are almost charming compared to the frustrating disruptions of a big city. Our compost heap is going to work whether there’s a garbage strike or not. There aren’t any cabs, and traffic nightmares are almost nonexistent. Here, the worst incident of road rage is Roddy Murray flashing his brights at a pokey weekend driver.
We have a nice collection of oil lamps and candles that we use now when the power goes out. Three days without electricity may be a bit too much, but three hours? It’s kind of romantic.
(Jim Mullen contributes regularly to Entertainment Weekly, where he can be reached at [email protected].)