Woke frightened at five this morning from the loudest crash I’ve ever heard. Shook the house. Seemed inches away, somewhere on our property.
Mr UD slept through it, natch.
I glanced at my laptop on the bedside table. Its lights blinked off, one after another — green, red, gold, white. Out.
Tripping over the dog, I went to the living room and looked out of the big windows at the back woods, expecting to see an enormous, semi-dead tree on the ground, blanketing the ground cover with leaves and broken limbs. Nothing there.
I checked the front windows for a tree on the lawn. No.
Back in bed, I woke up Mr UD. Was it some chemical explosion on the train tracks? An airborne toxic event?
He dressed and walked up Rokeby Avenue. A few feet away from our yard, one of our neighbor’s enormous, semi-dead trees had crashed into the street, taking all the electrical wires with it. “They’re hot, the wires,” said Mr UD. “They’re sparking.”
************************************
Asplundh trucks appeared, as did Garrett Park’s mayor (he strode up and down in front of our house, talking into his cell phone) plus the town administrator, who sat in one of the town’s adorable white trucks with Garrett Park written in green on each door, and somberly watched as the Asplundh guys set up orange cones and took out electric saws.
By eight o’clock they’d cleared Rokeby, on either side of which lay stacks of thick wood. Regular readers know that UD‘s property already has plenty of stacks of wood along its forested sides, left over from earlier tree removals. Now there are many, many more, just adjacent.
The town a few years ago planted a delicate magnolia in front of my neighbor’s house. That seems to have been wiped out.
*************************************
So again we’re dark. We lose electricity in the winter, we lose it in the spring.
I told Mr UD I was writing a post about what it’s like, losing light and heat and electricity all the time.
“You’re calling it ‘The Ontology of the Outage’? Don’t you mean the metaphysics of the outage?”
“Yes. Yes, I do. And I originally went with that title. But consider the alliteration you get with ontology… I’ve spent the morning going back and forth between the values of style and content…”
“And you’ve chosen – of course – style. You always care more about stylish writing than about accuracy.”
“Right. What are you gonna do about it?”
************************************
The art of losing isn’t hard to master, says Elizabeth Bishop. But she’s kidding. Read the poem. She’s being ironic.
Losing light and heat all the time is actually pretty easy to master. Almost getting killed by trees is more difficult, but let’s put aside, for the moment, that problem.
I remember when my Uncle Mario, a wealthy developer, came to visit us just after we bought our Garrett Park house. “You don’t have grounded wires?” He was appalled. “You’re gonna lose electricity every time the wind blows. And look at these enormous, semi-dead trees.”
Oh. Pishposh. UD, an old hippie, is heavily invested in not living like a wealthy developer. If the price of her maintaining a mental self-image of debonair freedom is constant darkness, it’s a price she’s willing to pay.
April 20th, 2010 at 2:59PM
A *real* hippie doesn’t need all that much electricity…just enough to run the stereo to play the old 33 1/3 records from the 1960s. You could probably generate enough with just a few hours a day pedaling a stationary bike hooked to a small generator…
April 20th, 2010 at 3:20PM
David: Laughing out loud here.
April 20th, 2010 at 3:33PM
Exploding electrical transformers can be equally scary. The one time in my life I cursed in front of my mother (“oh shit!” which got a glare from her at me – I was 23) was when we were driving somewhere together and an electrical transformer ahead of us on the street started sparking and then blew.
We used to have transformers blow all the time near my classroom building; we’d lose power for 1/2 hour or so. It finally stopped after an apartment complex was built next to us and the problem the electrical company always claimed was “squirrels getting into the transformers” turned out to actually be some kind of short in the system that was discovered when they were hooking the new complex up to the grid.