Surviving a Country Power Outage: Part Two

Dusk comes so quickly in the winter. We don't realize it as we flip lights on at 4 pm, but it rushes up on you. There's nothing to do but try to read a little, talk, tell stories, mess around with the kids. I'm actually nostalgic for it, only a week later, because being without power and its attendant distractions narrows our focus; makes us appreciate each other and the simple things in life.We read the kids their favorite books from early childhood, making them laugh 'til they lost their breath. Bill is really good at reading Nuts to You. He does it in a most politically incorrect way, writing new verse on the fly. Here, I'm reading Big Lil and Little Bill with a similarly ridiculous attack. We also told them stories about their babyhood, always a hit.

We brought Charlie the macaw into the living room as there was no heat in the studio where he lives, and his happy clucks and chortles cheered us all. Chet and Charlie thought it was all grand--everyone together in the kitchen and living room with nothing better to do than play with them.People need more kisses in a power outage. This is something that dogs just know.

Every three hours, I would dip a spaghetti pot full of water out of the planted Amazon fish tank, bring it near boiling on the stove, and pour it back in the tank. Which, of course, was dark as night, everyone in suspended animation for the time being. I've read warnings that changing a tank's temperature by two or three degrees in a short period of time (is five minutes a short period of time?) can kill the fish.

Someone should have told my tetras and gouramis that they were about to die, because they frolicked and swam right into the stream of hot water like kids at a fire hydrant on a summer day, and all 50 plus denizens of the 40-gallon tank made it through three days of having their lil' hambones boiled just fine. Swimmingly. Oh boy, here she comes with the steaming spaghetti pot. Whee! My fish are so cute, up for anything. They beg shamelessly for treats, nibble my arms when I stick them in to weed the plants. And why not? Almost all of them were born and raised right here, so they've known only kindness. They've never been shipped in Styrofoam coolers from a massive farm in the Philippines, dumped into questionable water with sick and dying tankmates, chased and whacked against the side of the tank by a teen-aged boy with a net, put in a Baggie and twirled with a twist tie, and taken home shivering in a brown paper bag like most hapless pet store fish.

We went sledding. This is our driveway. Impassable to all but pedestrians, but surpassingly beautiful.There were things about this power outage that were rare and lovely, as many as there were inconveniences. However...

By the third full day of this, I was tired of boiling aquarium water, tired of worrying that my fish and plants would die, tired of cooking from dawn to dusk, tired of washing the dishes and Tupperware, tired of cleaning out the refrigerator and deciding what to do with everything perishable, tired of the niggly business of surviving, and so was Bill. We both needed to do something else for awhile. He took a saw to the pine branches that were down across the driveway, gathered up the kids and fled to town (and a crushing workload at the office) in my 4WD Explorer. Here's our house (the tiny square tower on the left) in a Zhivagoan forest of icicles, as viewed from the road.
I couldn't leave the house, heated as it was by open flame, but that was OK with me. I went out and plugged my laptop into Bill's car charger so I could work. I had to run the car for an hour and a half to get the laptop charged to 90%. Let me know if that sounds green to you. It seemed pretty ridiculous to me, but by Wednesday I had to do something other than cook and wash dishes. I sat on the couch, running the battery back down, writing a chapter on ospreys for my book, shooting pictures of birds gobbling down Zick dough every time I looked up. Four male bluebirds at one time. Sa-weet!

Chet was curled up next to me, Charles on my shoulder, the fire gibbering and guttering away. It was pretty darned nice. And then the laptop battery died, and I opened the freezer.

Everything had thawed. Not cold, not even cool, but warm to the touch. Oh, feh! I don't know what I expected, with the kitchen at a steamy 70 degrees, the oven cranking away with its door open only a couple of feet away. I guess I hadn't wanted to know, and hoped for the best. I sighed, coming back out of my writerly reverie, realizing that the messy business of life will always and ever intrude upon art. I began throwing things out, dumping them into bowls and pots and pans and stacking the containers in the foyer. I looked at the line of pots full of lima beans and corn and sausage and frozen pizzas, sighed, got a muck bucket, and dumped everything into that. It was spectacular in a sad, wasteful, nauseating kind of way. The thing that bothered me the most was that we probably wouldn't have eaten most of the stuff, anyway. The freezer is where good food goes to die in my house. It lies in state with occasional brief viewings until the next power outage, when it is given last rites by possum, crow and coyote.

I should have a freezer the size of a bar fridge to keep me honest.

I was halfway through the freezer purge when the refrigerator gave a loud harrummph and the aquarium filter began to clatter. It was 6 pm, and I'd already lit the oil lamps for the long evening, already steeled myself to getting in bed at 8 PM and waking up at 2 AM, not knowing where I was or why my nose was so cold. I turned on the lights in the kitchen and continued with the grim task I'd started, knowing that I didn't want any of this stuff to refreeze and lie in state until next winter. Bill came in the door with a couple of nice bottles of wine and we poured a glass and drank it with all the lights burning.

In the morning, he hauled the muck bucket of food out to the meadow for the crows and coyotes, and set up the game camera to record the orgy.