Power-less
By Martina Law
The
overhead power lines in my street
resemble a huge spider net and
also remind me of the 70s. Am I
stuck in a time warp? No, I’m just
in suburban Seattle. They haven’t
seemed to bother updating their
power supply like Germany where
all power lines are underground,
safely hidden from falling
branches and severe weather
conditions. When I moved here, I
didn’t know that power outages in
this area are expected like the
monsoon rain in Southeast Asia.
You just have to prepare yourself
for the inevitable.
We had
to learn it the hard way, though.
Our first power outage hit us
during a cold, stormy winter
evening. We were just sitting down
to watch TV when suddenly the
lights went out. Maybe a bad fuse
we initially thought, but a look
outside the window told us that
our entire neighborhood was
experiencing a blackout. The first
ten minutes we just sat and waited
for the miracle of electricity.
Once we realized that the power
wasn’t going to be restored that
quickly, we began to panic. Where
was our flashlight? How come we
haven’t bought any wood for the
fireplace yet? Where are the
candles? What about the lighter
that used to sit on the piano? We
found matches instead.
Once
the temperature in our house hit
below zero, and even our winter
jackets couldn’t keep us warm
anymore, we decided to sacrifice
our coffee table, a wedding
present from my parents-in-law. I
never liked it anyway. The coffee
table turned out to be great
firewood, and we gathered around
the fireplace like the first men
must have once they discovered
fire. The colder it got, the
closer we moved to the fire,
risking first degree burns.
Time
without constant entertainment via
radio or TV went by slowly. I
looked at my husband, he looked at
me.
“Hey,
how have you been?” he asked.
“Good,
thank you. I haven’t noticed that
you grew a beard. It looks good on
you.”
It was
like our first date 15 years ago.
A disturbingly loud humming noise
interrupted our newly awakened
romance. We looked outside and in
the middle of the darkness one
house was beaming with flickering
Christmas lights, suggesting
inside warmth. As soon as my eyes
adjusted to the darkness, I
noticed all the other neighbors
pressing their frozen blue noses
against the windows and looking
enviously in the same direction.
There was the survivor champion of
us all: the neighbor with the
generator.
The
cold and the generator’s noise
kept us all awake for the rest of
the night.
In the
next two days we were getting used
to our prehistoric life style. The
power came back on when we least
expected it – in the middle of the
third night. All of a sudden, a TV
voice enthusiastically announced:
“And if you call within the next
10 minutes, you’ll get the second
onion chopper for free.” The
lights went on, the microwave
beeped and the furnace started
working again. It took us a while
to get used to our high-tech life.
We
learned our lesson, though. We
bought an entire camping set, not
for the outdoors but for the power
outages. We also stocked up on
water and groceries. Oh, and
something else we got: A generator
- bigger and louder than our
neighbor’s.
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2006 All content property of European Weekly unless where otherwise
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