Most of the power outages I’ve experienced have been short-lived, one to fifteen minute things. The outage of August 2024 was the exception. No less than four tornados swept through town, leaving close to half a million people without electricity, most also without Internet.
This was not the killer storm of Independence Day 1969 which struck smack in the middle of the audience of a major local fireworks display. My family always preferred the supposedly dangerous backyard displays to such large, ostentatious affairs. We did have to take my grandmother home. But despite the spectacle of riding past arcing power lines, my family had power by noon the next day.
The August 2003 outage was a dramatic example of how a single outage can cascade, trigger other outages, blacking out half the country. But it also left me with a sense of peace, lying in bed seeing how bright the full moon shines without urban light polution. A calm my younger, more energetic self enjoyed to its full beneifit.
No, this time, I was listening to an interesting British CD I saw advertized on facebook (yes, I’m one of those stream-eschewing real media freaks) of odd English hits of the mid-1960s, including Kiki Dee, long before she met a guy named Reg, several bands featuring future members of Deep Purple, and singer Carl Douglas long before he met some funky Chinamen (in funky Chinatown).
Despite my preference for media I can hold in my hand, I do not live in a cave. I noticed the rain start and quickly grow intense with occasional thunder, which went well with a rather dramaatic Dusty Springfield song that was playing. Then the CD stopped, the oven clock went dead, and the levitating moon globe crashed to the floor.
Almost immediately, owners of a popular camera/doorbell, whose name escapes me, failing to toll any chimes, started to ask “Is your power down?” And then another and another immediately after that. After three days of this same question, it got more than a bit monotonous and I was tempted to comment, “Power? What is this power you speak of? Do you not realize all power is illusionary and we are all powerless?”
As these were all folks in my relative area, I opted to avoid that temptation.
The loss of the Internet was annoying, but gave me the opportunity to go “retro” and use non-web based activities. I write (fairly obvious), I “play at” music, I would have done other things (like try to teach myself Javascript—for some unknown reason). But the App Store requires Internet access.
Going on the fourth day, there was a gnawing frustration at being unable to access the internet but it was never a throwing things, stamping around sort of thing. Largely it was handled with good humor. After all, I had a very thick book I’ve been putting off reading since February, plenty of beverages,, and a good supply of cigars. The weather on the front porch was nice. So this was not a big deal—during the day.
Nights were a time of flashlights and candles ... and very weird lighting. Mood lighting for vampires, you might say.
I was concerned about running out of clean clothes—washing machines and dryers all require power—how silly of large appliance manufacturers for forgetting a crank of some sort. And there was the issue of the dishes.
I noticed an odd coincidence (of course it was) as the outage occurred on the same day the State entered the twenty-first century by legalizing the recreational useage of a long, and wrongly, prohibited botanical. The Governor was never a fan of this change, dragging his feet for months, insisting that participants be born at least the year of the last major blackout. Another coincidence? I had to wonder.
At 4:17am on Saturady, the power came back on. I had to reset the router—power off, wait, power on. But after that, I was up and running.
So, what did I do when the lights went out? As the ghosts of my grandmothers (or the ghost of a recently deceased friend) might have nagged me by the third day, "they won’t wash themselves." So by the light of a couple candles, I washed the dishes.
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