Sunday, February 08, 2009

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.

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Thursday, February 05, 2009

Surviving a Country Power Outage

I must have known it was coming, a monster ice storm with a three-day power outage. On a trip to town on Monday January 26, I laid in food for us and for the wildlife that could have kept a whole regiment and all their pets fed for a week. Good thing, too. On Tuesday, I drove to Akron to pick Bill up, fresh from an exhausting trip to Florida. We got home just as the ice storm hit that evening, the roads rapidly becoming impassable sheets of ice. Tuesday afternoon, it started to rain on top of snow, with the air temperature standing at 26 degrees. We know what that means.
These are the kids' tracks on Wednesday morning, January 27, as they investigated the crunchy-glazed skating rink that had once been our yard. Photographed from the birding tower. It's been pouring all night and the air temperature is standing at 26.

One of those sneaky upper-level warm air masses was squatting over frigid southeast Ohio, dumping rain down onto earth and trees that had been frozen solid for ten days or more. Ice had been forming all night, a half-inch layer on every twig and wire, and I awoke at 5:15 Wednesday morning to the ominous sound of branches snapping in the woods, trees falling with a swish and tinkle of ice; rain pattering on a thick glazed crust of snow. Here it comes. I lay in the dark, marveling at the red glow of the clock radio, wondering what I should do to prepare for the outage, thinking ahead and behind to the outages before, knowing that when it came, this would be a big'un. I lay there a little too long.
At 5:58, the red glow winked off, and I hadn't so much as turned up the thermostat from its night setting of 62 degrees to at least start us off with a warm house. The dishwasher was full of dirty dishes. Blast! I'd have to do them by hand. And so much else.

We've got heat when the power's off, in the form of some gas logs in the living room, and our gas stove in the kitchen, which becomes an oversized space heater with the oven door open. That's it, but with curtains drawn across the kitchen entry, it's enough to keep our living space at 70 degrees, a huge blessing. (It did get down to 44 degrees in the basement, a bit too close to freezing for comfort...) Perhaps even better, we've got water, too, since we got gravity-feed town water about five years ago. And best of all, we've got an old gas water heater with an old-fashioned pilot, not one of those silly clickclickclickity electronic ignited things that needs electricity--duh!--to start. Having hot water in a power outage ROCKS. So Hard. If you can do dishes, get a hot shower now and then, you're really golden, because there are a lot of dishes generated by a snowed-in family of four with nothing better to do than cook rapidly spoiling food and eat it. We've survived a five-day power outage without water, before we got hooked into gravity-fed town water, and I found myself melting snow to heat on the stove to wash the dishes and endless Tupperware from all the food quickly spoiling in the powerless fridges and freezers. Yeah, two fridge/freezers and one chest freezer.

I can tell you that, however you feel about reading this blog, you do not want to be around me in an extended power outage without running water. In this one, with my running hot water, I was June Cleaver by comparison. Keeping my apron starched and cinched around my tiny girdled waist, my high heels clicking as I bustled about humming a happy tune. I will confess to hitting the wine about dark each evening. "Highball, darling?"A tree sparrow basks in a moment of sun.

The greenhouse is heated with gas, so life goes on there, too. Light comes in the form of some old oil lamps (the only way to go, much safer than candles) and our indispensible Petzl headlamps, one for each of us. Liam and Phoebe look really cute in headlamps, reading Captain Underpants or Calvin and Hobbes. Entertainment for the kids is drawing, reading, and playing together in the snow, and playing with Chet and Charlie, who goes from shoulder to shoulder cackling with glee.Don't be alarmed at his beak. It's not deformed--he's actually chewing the black drawstring cord of my sweatshirt here. He's ruined all our sweatshirts that way.
photo by Phoebe Thompson

All told, we're in fine shape, if somewhat cranky and out-0f-sorts as we shrug off our various electronic addictions. My major focus becomes cooking, as I don't want to lose all the fresh food I've laid in. So I got up Wednesday morning to a silent, dark house, started the gas fire, got down on my knees and lit the oven, washed the dishwasher contents by hand, and began cooking. I made a huge batch of spaghetti sauce and boned a bunch of chicken thighs. Started a soup with the bones and prepped a meal of chicken korma and stir-fried vegetables for that evening. Made the rest of the hamburger (we always buy family packs of everything) into burgers for the next night's cookout. Sorted through the fridge, making sure I had all the fresh food taken care of, and set a bunch of perishables out on the stoop to stay cold. Didn't want to deal with the freezer just yet. Which turned out to be a mistake.

Next: What do you do when it gets dark at 5 pm?

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