I live in a relatively quiet cul-de-sac in Shoreline these days. I say relatively, because the guy who lives next door loves to talk on his cellphone outside in all weather and all times, blathering on about something or other with seeming great importance.
It’s a nice place to live, don’t get me wrong. Coming from all the way across the country and trying to find a place to live in Seattle again was a hit or miss proposition at best and we really hit the spot right on the head.
Still, it’s not Mayberry. I know, because I used to live in Mayberry. Well, Port Orchard, but it was darned close to Mayberry. The only thing missing was Sheriff Taylor. But e had plenty of Barney Fifes on the police force to event things out.
When I moved to Port Orchard, I thought it slightly alarming that the neighbor greeted us with fresh zucchini bread that his wife had just baked. I checked it for razor blades, being big city folks. There weren’t any.
As she delivered the bread, she said something curious: “You’ll really like it over here – except that the power goes out about four times a year during the Fall and Winter.”
A power outage. Big deal, I thought. The power goes out everywhere. So you find something else to do until the power comes on. You unplug the computers and the rest of the electronics and occasionally phone the company to find out when service would be restored.
I didn’t really give it much thought. In fact, that first year, the power went out four times, just like she had said.
I guess I was lulled into a false sense of security. I didn’t even give much thought to such basic things as flashlights and candles. The power outages were little things, lasting a couple hours or so.
Then the next winter came around. The 1996-97 winter for those who remember it.
It announced its arrival at 3 a.m. The loss of power set off the bricks under our desks, the uninterruptible power supplies and been interrupted. The power popped back on almost immediately, leaving me the unpleasant task of resetting all the digital clocks and VCRs in the house. It took me an hour to figure out the coffee maker, which can’t be turned on without setting the clock; there is no manual override.
Later that day, the power went out again. By now, we were under siege by a rare ice storm. If you lived here, you probably remember it. Power poles snapped like twigs, twigs snapped like, uhh twigs, as did entire trees.
I guess I shouldn’t have bothered with the coffee maker. The timer would need to be reset yet again, but this time there would be no hurry. I just wasn’t going to fall for the same trick I fell for at early dark thirty that morning. I was just going to wait until a time in the future when I needed coffee and the power was back on.
I would have to wait a long time. The power didn’t come back on like it always had before.
No biggy, I thought. We’ll just go survivalist. I had learned a few things from the year before. I had a natural gas grill on the back deck with an endless supply of gas from the gas company. We definitely wouldn’t starve.
I lit up the grill and boiled some water to make coffee and cream of wheat. I even toasted a few pieces of bread. Yum. This wasn’t so bad. I could do this for a couple more hours. I could rough it, no problem. Maybe even all day.
I had already bundled up in my long johns and sweater. Eventually I put on another sweater. Then another. I started to find that it was difficult to put my arms down. I felt like the kid from A Christmas Story.
A day went by, then another. If I had had a TV, I would have known that we were in the grips of a legendary storm and that other areas were suffering outages too. But I didn’t have that luxury. I felt as if I were all alone.
I wasn’t. I knew I wasn’t because I could hear the chattering of two other sets of teeth in the house – my then wife and my still daughter. The temperature in the house was trying desperately to match the temperature outside.
I kept checking the thermostat. 71 degrees, 69. 66. 64. 63. 61. 60. It continued to plummet. It finally stopped at 56.
On a fall day, 56 doesn’t seem so bad when you’re outside. But inside, man that’s cold. We had to use our blankets to protect the computers because it said something on the side that they shouldn’t be stored in temperatures under 55 or some darned thing and we had to protect all our client’s files.
The computers stayed toasty. We froze. By now, it became apparent that candles were no longer going to be good as a heat source. Perhaps they never were. I suppose you’re wondering why we didn’t light the fireplace. We tried. But without wood, it doesn’t seem to want to burn very long.
Being the new homeowners on the street, we hadn’t thought about buying a cord of wood yet. If I could have, I would have nawed through one of the trees on the back 40 (feet) and shoved them into the fire. Hell, I should have just ripped some 2x4s out of our walls.
It was then that my neighbor Rick knocked on the door. He said, “I see your fireplace doesn’t seem to be working well, thought I would see if I can fix it.”
I told him he could, if he had some wood. He looked at me oddly and said, “Sure we do. A couple cords. Only a fool would try to go through a winter here without wood.”
A fool or a city slicker.
A couple of sticks of dried wood later and the house sprang back to life. We huddled by the now roaring fire, relishing it, our hot chocolate and the power, which had just come on again.
In the Emerald City, praying that big city power will be better than it was in Mayberry,
– Robb