A Few Hours Without Power This Week (Which Made Me Grumpy)

by Robin Hagen

This is the kind of reading you do when the power goes out, because how does the generator work again? Not exactly reading for pleasure.

Our power went out this week—unfortunate and unexpected. It’s always hard to know what to do when the power goes out. You can’t know initially if it’s going to be a short outage, one that lasts a few minutes or an hour or two—or one that will last for hours or even days. It makes a difference, because if it’s just a blip, there’s no need to drag out the generator. But if it’s longer, it’s worth the effort, mostly because a generator will save all the food you just bought at Costco and stored in your freezer. You’d hate to lose your frozen turkey burgers which were on sale, your frozen chicken thighs, your turkey lunchmeat, your shredded cheese. A generator will also run your Wi-Fi and charge your phone, which of course is basically out of battery when the power abruptly disappears.

Initially this week, I was sure it wouldn’t be an extended outage. It’s not like we were having wild, crazy weather. It wasn’t raining, snowing, or storming. We weren’t really even into fire season yet. The power company notifies us of planned outages when they expect the weather to be especially windy and fire prone, but there wasn’t one scheduled this week. Sure, it was windy, but not crazily so. I noticed that a few of my trees were losing limbs, but overall it didn’t seem like that big of a deal.

Except apparently it was.

According to my local Facebook group, which immediately becomes my most important news source when the power disappears, a tree fell on some power lines up in Alta. Somebody posted a picture of the downed tree and the cavalcade of PG&E trucks that arrived to fix the damage. When I saw that, I decided that it looked like it might be an extended outage after all and that it was probably a good idea to pull out the generator.

I am grateful to have a generator, but it is a pain to set up. I confess that when the power goes out in a winter blizzard, I tend to load my refrigerated items into my ice chest and set them out in the snow, a wonderful source of natural cooling. I’ll only get out the generator if my electronics absolutely need to be charged. Other than that, I try to do my best without power. I’m grateful that I have two lamps that still operate during an outage, powered by nifty IKEA lightbulbs. I also have candles, battery-operated lanterns, and a woodstove with an ample supply of firewood (that I hopefully remembered to bring in before the storm hit).

But when the power goes out on a lovely spring day and I have recently been to Costco and my freezer is full? It makes sense to unearth the generator and the extension cords, to carefully move the refrigerator away from the wall so that I can unplug it and then plug it into an extension cord that runs outside to the generator. I’m lucky that my generator runs on propane as well as gas and that I have three tanks. It’s relatively easy to start and hummed to life right away.

But I’ll confess that a power outage was not in my plan for the day. It went out around 5:00 pm and didn’t come back the next morning around 8:00. It was annoying because it didn’t feel like the power company was even aware of our outage at first. I checked the outage map online and was informed that my power was on! When I clicked the box that said it wasn’t, it did some kind of magical check of my meter, at which point it came back and told me that yes, I was right, my power really was off. A few minutes later, I received the first call from the power company telling me that there was an outage in my area. I already knew that by then, though, since I had checked my local Facebook page and saw that people all around had lost power, too. Strange, though, that it didn’t seem like the power company knew about the outage at first.

When the power is out, I feel lost. Even if I get out the generator and charge my phone and my watch, even if I can theoretically do most of the things that I like to do, things that don’t even take power? I don’t do them. I sigh and obsessively check the local Facebook page and wander around aimlessly. I went to bed in the dark and when I woke up a little in the night, I reached over to see if my reading light would turn on, if the power had been restored. It had not.

I confess the power outage made me grumpy.

While I was stewing about how inconvenient and annoying it was to deal with a power outage on a Sunday evening, how things like this shouldn’t happen, I eventually started to remember that a power outage is not such a big deal in the grand scheme of life. I remembered that actually I am lucky to have a home that has electricity ninety-nine percent of the time. I am lucky to have a generator. I am lucky that I had the resources to go to Costco a few days before and fill up my freezer and refrigerator with good food.

I had to deal with a few hours without power the other day—but I am not a parent of a child who was killed in Iran by a U.S. bomb. I am not a Palestinian. I am not someone in the Congo who has contracted Ebola. I am not living in Cuba where the island’s power grid is collapsing and residents are dealing with ongoing blackouts without any idea of when they will be fixed. I live in a town where my power company does its best to get electricity back as soon as it can. I am privileged and have a generator and am apparently prone to whining when one of my assumed conveniences disappears. (What? You mean I have to use my generator! The horror!)

Our power was restored early the next day. It was out for a few hours but came back as soon as was possible. I easily forget how lucky I am that this is true.