When I was a little kid, I used to love it when the power would go out at my parents’ house. It didn’t happen all that often, but when it did, it was really wonderful to just sit there and listen to the silence. As compared to a gasoline engine, most electrical devices are well nigh silent already, but as anyone with appliances (i.e., everybody) knows, even electrical gadgets make a fair bit of noise. So it was pretty special when the power went out — and if it happened at night, we got to light up the kerosene lamps and the candles and whatnot. It was a great excuse to stop doing whatever you were doing, and just be a family for a while…so I always liked when the power went out.
Unsurprisingly, the main cause of power outages were the various sorts of storms that ply the skies over our humble home, and of these, certainly the most fun and dramatic were the thunderstorms. Sleet and other ice-based phenomena probably won out over the thunderstorms in terms of taking out the power lines, but they couldn’t hold a candle — so to speak — to a really violent thunderhead, with these amazing, jagged bolts of lightning that could make all the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end.
My mom was always kind of scared of thunderstorms, although she never wanted to show it, because she didn’t want me to worry. But I loved them — in fact, I’d usually go running outside to watch the trees blowing around with their leaves all flipped over the wrong way, like they always do before a storm. And you could always feel a kind of charge in the air, right when it was going to rain. The whole sky would light up, then, and your heart would go a little faster — your body generally has sense enough to be scared of lightning, even if you don’t — and then the rain would start sweeping its way down along the valley, until it washed right over me standing there with my mouth open to catch the drops.
At first, mom tried to get me to come back inside, but she gave up after she realized how much I loved being out in the rain. I think she was mostly concerned because after about half an hour of that, I was fit to be wrung out, and she had that omnipresent concern that I would catch pneumonia and die.
If I ever become a parent someday, I will probably understand that. But I digress.
You’d think that when you get older, the fascination for such things would pass, kind of the way every little kid goes through this stage where (s)he is utterly fascinated with dinosaurs, and then kind of forgets they exist. But this is different — there’s still a little secret part of my heart that jumps up and down applauding when the power goes out. I realized this yesterday afternoon when a storm took out three or four powerlines in Hanover, and there was about an hour of complete chaos.
As you may recall from one of last week’s monologues, we’ve had a considerable dry spell here in Vermont and New Hampshire. With the exception of one brief spate of raining last Saturday, there had been essentially no precipitation for a couple of weeks. Exposed grass has been browning and dying, and the weather got hotter and more humid every day. Yesterday, the spell finally broke…with a great crash of thunder, water began sluicing down out of the sky as if somebody had upended a bucket. I was inside at the time, working on a problem set, and I leapt up like a little kid, and dashed out to watch.
Well, inside of about half an hour, it had pretty much played itself out, but in that time it had thoroughly soaked the land. There were streams of water three or four inches deep coursing down the street outside my house. It was great!
And then my phone rang.
“Hello,” I said into it. It was my friend Daniel, whom I’d been supposed to meet about two and a half hours previously, but of course, I had completely failed to remember this, and my phone line had been tied up with the modem until just before I ran outside to watch the storm.
“Oops,” I said, and allowed as how I would come meet him in a little bit.
So, I strip down to take a shower, and all of a sudden I hear that piercing, twenty-four second emergency broadcasting system tone. You know the one I’m talking about, right? Come on, recite along with me — you know you can — “this has been a test of the emergency broadcasting system. If this had been an actual emergency, the broadcasters in your area would have followed up with news, information, and instructions for the people of your listening area. This station covers the towns of Hanover, … etc.”
Except — this one wasn’t a test.
“Bullshit,” I can hear you saying. “There’s no such thing. The Emergency Broadcasting System is simply a device invented by the FCC to annoy the shit out of radio listeners for twenty-four seconds every month, it’s never actually used for anything important.”
Seriously, though — this was an actual EBS alarm. I was shocked.
The radio announcer went on to inform us that the National Weather Service in Concord had issued a severe thunderstorm warning for all of Grafton and Carroll counties in New Hampshire (Grafton County is where I presently reside — for the geographically interested, it’s just west of Carroll, just south of Coos, just north of Sullivan, and just east of Vermont). The thunk you heard at the end was the sound of the barn door closing behind the horse who has just escaped. But he went on to caution people gravely to be careful driving, get their wills in order, put their head between their legs and kiss their asses goodbye.
“But in the meantime,” he said cheerfully, dropping back into ‘radio announcer’ mode, “let’s get back to the music…here’s Vorpal Spigot with their new hit ‘Satanic Blood Sausage’…”
Okay, so I was just kidding about the wills. And kissing your ass goodbye. But he was trying to sound really serious, and it was pretty amusing.
So I took a shower, and ventured forth to survey the results.
I locked my door at #3B School St. and got into my car to drive over to meet Daniel. Between that moment and about five minutes later when I arrived there, the power had failed. The reason, it seems, was the pair of power lines just across the street which had been taken out by a suicidal tree-limb, leaping to save itself from the lightning bolt which had struck the tree. A bunch of us, as is the custom in these times, stood out on the lawn to gawk at this spectacle.
“Yup,” we said, nodding to each other, “those are power lines. And they’re lying on the ground.”
“Yup,” we nodded back. “Power lines.” And we pointed to them. “And look…they’re lying on the ground.”
(I think restating the obvious is something we need to do to verify that we’re not hallucinating)
We were shortly chased away by a stressed-looking individual from the Power Company, who prophesied painful electrical deaths for anyone within three utility-poles’ radius of the damage. Apparently — well, you know in the cartoons, when the fire-fighters drop the hose, and it goes flailing all over the place like a demented snake, hosing everyone and everything in sight? Well, apparently downed power lines will do the same thing, except with electricity, under the right circumstances. Frankly, I would have cheerfully risked being crispy-fried for the chance to see that, but he chased us back inside.
Sorrowfully, we took our leave. But then, inspired by the sound of sirens from downtown, several of us made our separate ways down the street to survey the damage.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I think just about the most amusing thing in the world is watching someone in a business suit when the power goes out. The particular target of my amusement, in this case, was a fellow outside the bank, pacing up and down looking at his watch. You know, like you do when you’re waiting for somebody, and you want to convey to them that you’re really in quite a hurry, and would they please get their ass in gear? Except there was nobody — he was being impatient for the benefit of the fifty million volts of electricity or so that took out the power lines.
And he wasn’t alone. All over the place, people were moping and complaining, and rushing about as if they had something really important to get done, and having the power go out was some kind of really annoying policy decision. I heard one person say, “They really shouldn’t let this happen.”
“They?” I thought. I wonder who he meant. Did he think the Power Company had planned this? Or that some bureaucrat had scheduled it to happen? And, since it had, why was he in such a hurry to get back to work? What in heaven’s name would possess someone, who had just been granted a coffee break by what insurance companies consider an act of God, get all upset about it? “This man,” I concluded, “must have a large blunt object rammed up his backside.”
The intersection of Main and Wheelock streets, the primary carrier of traffic in town, had gone from a moderate midafternoon trickle to a full-blown rush hour as people tried to get out of (or into — I’m not sure which) Hanover. A somewhat harried-looking police officer manned the intersection, directing the streams of traffic with a patience I am certain I could never have mustered. Besides which, I would be scared to death to stand in the middle of a four-way intersection, even if I were carrying a gun. All around, there was this kind of unexplainable chaos just because the power had gone out. What were these people thinking?
I suspect the majority of people were basically sensible about the whole thing, and just stayed put to wait it out. I got my drum out, and went to sit out on the roof and play for a while. I left the outside light on, on the principle that it would actually light up once the power got restored. And, in fact, that was the case, within about an hour. So nothing bad came of it.
I guess I was just a little surprised.. and maybe even disappointed. Where I came from, nobody got very worked up when the power got out — it was just another fact of life. If it happened during the day, you ignored it; at night, you lit candles and waited it out, or just went to bed. I guess I expected, perhaps erroneously, that people anywhere would react similarly. After all, what can you do about it? Well, you could go crazy and waste a lot of energy yelling and screaming…but it’s probably easier just to find something else to do.
Of course, it helps that I have a computer which can operate from battery power. :)
Needless to say, it’s much cooler and more pleasant out now that the rain has finally come. It’s still having some trouble deciding whether to be cloudy or clear — the sun has poked through a few times already today, and then hidden itself behind the clouds again. But that’s nothing unusual. After all, this is New England…and if nothing else, New England is known for its weather.
At any rate, it appears that things have settled down to normal again this morning. The Christian Scientists next door congregated bright and early as they usually do; the streets have dried out, and people are driving way too fast again, just like any other day of the week. The radio is playing live versions of the Rolling Stones, and here I am, lying in bed at noon like a complete slug.
You know, things could be an awful lot worse.
Filed by Michael at 18:45 under Personal, Story