Powerless

There were days of high wind warnings and finally it happened. A storm blew through Snohomish County, downed power lines, and knocked piles of branches off nearly every tree. Whole trees came down too. Everywhere you went, roadways and parking lots were piled with green piney branches, pushed to the side or along the center line of the road, either by road crews or cars driving through. No one picked up or moved the branches, or logs, lying around. There wouldn’t have been time to pick up that monstrous quantity of debris that truly was everywhere.

And of course, we lost power. With five minutes left in the first episode of Indian Summers that I was streaming, and with a load of laundry about halfway through its drying cycle…everything went dark.

Fortunately, Bill and I are quite accustomed to losing power, which used to happen with a fair amount of regularity back in Woodstock. And in Woodstock, it was a bigger deal when it happened, for several reasons. For one thing, we had our own well, so that when the power went out, we would lose water too, once we had used up the small amount already in the pipes.

We also had a basement that was prone to flooding and so it had a sump pump, which of course didn’t work when the power was out. During Hurricane Irene, the worst power outage we had there, lasting almost a week, our basement flooded so thoroughly that we found our freezer bobbing along afloat. Then there was winter. When the power went out in winter it was a true potential threat to our pipes and our lives.

On the other hand, back in Woodstock, we also were much better equipped to deal with a power outage. For one thing, we had a very efficient and beloved wood stove insert centrally located in the living room that could easily heat the whole house even in extremely cold weather. This house has one of the worst wood stove inserts ever sold, in a corner of our living room, which is both the coldest and the least used room in our house.

The first night without power felt like a bit of an adventure, as they always do. The power had gone out in the evening, which meant that the house retained most of its warmth during the night. Fortunately, my laundry was in the dryer, not the washer, when the power went, which meant my clothes were already clean, all I had to do was get out my rack and hang them up to dry which was only slightly more of a pain by flashlight than it would have been any other time.

The second night without power was decidedly less fun. We had plenty of firewood, so I did what I could, making as good a fire as I could in that drafty insert. We played cards by the fire for a while, then went to bed. Our bedroom was at the other end of the house from the fire, so I put on my Duofold union suit, fur booties, and a warm fleece, and then snuggled down into a sleeping bag supposedly rated for 40 degrees. I was warm enough…just barely.

In the morning I crawled out of bed, brushed my teeth with cold water and pulled on warm clothes and headed outside for an armload of firewood. Over the last eight years, I’ve lost the habit of lugging around wood, something I used to do every spring, fall, or winter day back in Woodstock. So my shoulder and back muscles were complaining a bit as I dumped the wood next to our outdoor wood stove, which was about when Bill poked his head out the door to say the power had come back on.

Our quiet little neighborhood was one of the last to have its power restored. Apparently, there’s a reason. Our neighbor across the street pointed out a transformer about halfway down the hill from his house with a blinking red light on it. That transformer, he said, is a problem. It always goes, and it’s always the last to get fixed, which makes sense I guess, given that our little enclave is less densely populated than most around here and many of its residents are retired.

Back in the Hudson Valley, old utility wires ran through the forests of spindly young trees. High winds knocked those trees down easily, and they would fall on the utility lines. We could count on losing power, at least for a little while a few times a year. The first year we lived in Snohomish, in our old rental farmhouse, an unprecedented windstorm came through and knocked out power for the whole county. We lost power for about 90 minutes–Bill was taking a nap and completely missed it. Since then, any outages had been brief.

But now we’re in a different house, and I looked out at the blinking transformer, and knew one thing. In the future, we would have be better prepared.

Image credit: SilentObserver via Creative Commons

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