Storm

This isn't our fence btw.


I woke up in the dark on Friday and realized that I couldn’t read the alarm clock. When you get to a certain age, you stop assuming that it’s just a problem with the alarm clock. I checked to make sure that I could still make out at least a few shadows. It had been raining all night and the big storm that hit Northern California had brought winds that closed all three major bridges around San Francisco. Our power was out.

I spent half the day at work and got a call from my daughter in the afternoon complaining that the power was still out and that she had heard from my wife that it might be out for two to three days. We didn’t know it when we moved in sixteen years ago, but our street sits on an odd patch of the electrical grid. It’s common for houses within a hundred yards of us to have power hours and even days before we do. That was the case when I came home that night after stopping to buy candles and firewood. One stoplight and a couple stores downtown were in darkness, but pretty much everything but our street seemed to have gotten power back. Actually, there’s one house three doors down from us that seemed to have power. Perhaps they have a generator or perhaps they’re tied to the grid in some other way.

I got inside. My wife had built a fire in our woodstove and was lying beneath a blanket in front of it along with two of our cats and one of the dogs. We found a bunch of old flashlights, listened to the radio, and my palm-treo still had enough battery life for me to surf the web for a couple minutes. We read some by flashlight and I fell asleep near the fire. We still had no power the next day. We had no lights, no internet, no television, no refrigerator, and no stove. The wind blew down a thirty foot section of our fence which meant we had to keep the dogs in the garage. Our daughter also put her chickens in a rabbit cage in the garage as well.

We made it through the day then prepared for another night of candles and flashlights. Fortunately, my neighbor’s nephew who also lives nearby also happens to be a lineman for Pacific Gas and Electric. Around eight at night, he pulled by our house in his truck. He’d been on a thirty six hour shift fixing everyone else’s power only to come home and discover that he didn’t have hot water. He pulled together a crew and made it a thirty eight hour shift. Our lights came back on at about ten. If we didn’t happen to have the neighbor, I suspect we still wouldn’t have power.

So much of the way we live is so fragile. In this case, a couple power lines came down. It’s still raining and there’s another larger storm headed this way in two days. I liked the reading by the fire with my family part, but I’d just as soon do so by choice. It’s amazing how little there is to do late at night when you don’t have electricity.

chancelucky