Diary of a madman, or what living a week without electricity will do to you
The following Power Outage Diary was found nailed to a splintered power pole on the South Hill:
Day One: We stand at our back window and marvel at the most awesome display of nature’s power! Giant ponderosa pines are swaying dramatically in the 70 mph gusts. The trees appear to be bowing down toward Mecca, or possibly Hillyard. Suddenly, with a mighty crack, one tree snaps off and crashes through our backyard power lines in a Fourth of July shower of sparks.
Our lights immediately blink out and our furnace shudders to a halt.
It seems so romantic! We get out our candles, our flashlights and our oil lamps. This could be a long outage – possibly even six or seven hours. This is no problem for us. We’ve been camping before! It’ll be just like a backpacking trip.
Day Two: Dawn lights our house. It takes me a second to remember – nothing else will be lighting our house for awhile. I peer out the windows and see several trees down. I see power lines draped across fences.
We need news. We fish out an old transistor radio but our local news station is off the air. We finally find a talk radio show in which people are calling in and reporting that, well, trees are down and the power is out.
I need coffee. I take my old Primus backpacking stove onto the back porch and fire up the butane. It’s a balmy 22 degrees, so starting it up takes only 13 attempts. Then, in precisely a half-hour, I see small bubbles begin to form on the bottom of the pan. In a jiffy, or 10 more minutes, it finally starts to boil. I carry it to my Mr. Coffee and pour it ever so slowly over grounds and let it drip even more slowly down. Finally, we have the familiar pleasure of our morning coffee. It is lukewarm, and it is noon.
At 3:50 p.m., the light outside starts to fade. We get ready for a second quiet, peaceful, candle-lit evening. We don’t want to open the fridge, in order to preserve the cold inside. So we open up a can of soup and I trudge back out onto the back porch and squat over my Primus stove for another half-hour. We dine, in the dark, on lukewarm chicken noodle.
Thank goodness we have good books to read. After a while, however, my headlamp is giving me a headache. So we play two games of Yahtzee by oil lamp and go to bed.
It is 8:30 p.m.
Day Three: The roads are open and I make an excursion to REI to buy more Primus fuel. I ask the salesperson if Primus stoves are safe to use inside. He says they are for outdoor use. I briefly consider arguing heatedly with him, but decide against it.
While cooking Nalley’s Chili on the back porch, wearing gloves and a hat, I ponder whether it would be really that awful, all things considered, to succumb to carbon monoxide poisoning. I hear it’s a peaceful way to go.
Day Four: The house is beginning to get cold, so we are pretty much restricted to huddling around the fireplace all day and all evening. The upside is, I no longer resent cooking our Kraft Macaroni and Cheese on the back porch. The kitchen is about the same temperature.
Day Five: I am really beginning to hate these “hurricane” oil lamps. Yes, they have a slightly brighter flame than a candle. Yes, they last a long time between refills. But they give off a petroleum stench worse than a diesel Volkswagen Passat. After breathing these fumes all evening, I am convinced that they are causing me to hallucinate. Last night, I dreamed our cable was back on. It was the most beautiful thing …
Day Six: I’m beginning to dread 3:50 p.m. every day. That’s when the daylight fades and we are faced with another six solid hours of darkness and existential nothingness before we can finally go to bed.
Tonight we get out the Scrabble board and play three games before I accuse my wife of cheating and storm out of the room. However, I make the strategic mistake of storming out without a flashlight, so I have to storm back in to grab one.
Some of my neighbors report that they, too, have become more irritable and easily annoyed over the last few days. Maybe this is just a natural result of stress. In my case, however, it is just another symptom of oil lamp poisoning.
Day Seven: This morning, our block was buzzing with rumors that power company trucks had been sighted in the neighborhood. Then this afternoon, the rumors came true. They arrived on our block and everyone gathered around to watch our rescuers climb the poles and go to work.
This evening, the big moment came when they hooked up the lines. Magically, houses lit up all over our block. Ours, I am despondent to say, was not one of them. We are served by a different line, still draped across our backyard.
We are so depressed tonight that we do not even have the energy to accuse each other of cheating at Boggle.
Day Eight: Things look brighter today, because our thoughtful neighbors, who now have power, have strung a power cord across the fence for us to use. The Primus stove is back in the camping box and I am cooking omelets on an electric griddle by an actual electric light. It is the utmost luxury, although we still have to huddle around the gas fireplace.
Even better, the CEO of Avista made a robocall tonight informing me that he is giving us a $150 gift card to Rosauers, since we are one of the customers “who won’t have power before Thanksgiving.” We can really use $150 worth of groceries, because I finally worked up the nerve to crack open the freezer and, wow, the stench was like an Iowa hog farm.
Day Nine (maybe Day 10, I can no longer keep track): Our long neighborhood nightmare is over. Crews from Montana and Oregon spent all day in our backyards, replacing poles and hooking everyone back up. The power went on at 1 p.m., just in time to cook an impromptu Thanksgiving dinner. When it came time to gather around the table and say what we were thankful for, we had no trouble coming up with a list. The top items: lights that blaze and furnaces that thrum.
Life has finally returned to normal. Well, almost. Tonight I dreamed our cable was back on.