Power Down
Written Sunday, December 3—Power outage Friday night. Was watching TV, noticing the cable signal freezing a lot. I shut down and unplugged the computer. Storm was coming on. Some lightning and thunder. Then rain started pattering on the glass pretty hard, wind whipped up, curtains blew long into the living room, a hard fresh wind. I realized water was getting in—a wave of it, a puddle already formed in the window sill, my record album covers getting wet. I shut the windows. About a minute later the power died. All this commotion in about two minutes, except for the shutting down of the computer—that came about 10 minutes before.
I searched he house in the dark for matches, candles, flashlight. Kept waiting for lightning to illuminate the room, hoping my eyes would looking the right place to see something useful. Sure enough—the 6-volt flashlight right where I was facing. Then was able to find candles and matches. Went outside with light to see what’s up. Chad coming out putting on his coat—putting his arm and a half into the sleeves as he walked. He thought maybe the tree in north yard had finally fallen and maybe taken wires down with it. We aimed both our flashlights on it, standing in the whipping wind and mist at the brow of the terrace the house sits above the yard on, felt like two seamen on edge of a boat, staring into a stormy sea. My flashlight was better—he asked could he borrow it, then could we trade—I took his long flashlight from under his half-arm (right arm) and he went striding down into the yard. “If you see me wiggling around and twitching, call an ambulance.” He got down there and established the wires weren’t down, but we could see the tree down from the house, a long black log on the ground when the lightning flashed.
Later I took a walk down the driveway, around the mass of fallen, wrecked timber near the dumpster—an incredible mess and quantity—down to the mailboxes, then out Miller Road the “back way” to 9G, then up towards that little convenience store, but saw it was dark. Had wanted to hear some kind of news. Recorded the trip on audio. Came home, read in bed by flashlight—Lady in the Lake, the third or fourth reading. Think I got the Dashiell Hammett novel after arriving in New York, but certainly after college.
Enjoyed the powerless evening. At one point I was lying on couch, feeling time passing very slowly, TV and computer conspicuously absent and a kind of gnawing desire for them, but also enjoying the forced quiet. The apartment remarkably still and dark. No TV, not little red lights here and there from the gadgets, no printer hum, no computer hum, no refrigerator rumble. I could see the sky outside one of the high windows, and watched an airplane’s red light cut across one corner of the window. Thoughts simultaneously here and in childhood, as it almost always is. Then the idea: one of the missing wonders of childhood is that then I was always looking forward and outward, not backward. And I could do that now—I could just stop longing for the past. If I did that for, say, a month, like an extended version of this untechlogied evening, would I have again some of the old wonder, desire, interest in the future and the wide world? And then I had the feeling right then, epiphanously. I saw that slow airplane light in the night sky in the quiet night and felt the kind of awe I lived with, and lived for, as a boy and teenager. The scary joy of moving toward my place in the historic adventure of earth.
As I was walking down my driveway in the dark later, I thought, “That moment has changed me.” ~ VIJournalDiary