Under the Weather

How well prepared are you for a disaster, even a  beautiful one?

We have food in the pantry and tons more in the freezer. We have a wood furnace and 10 cords of wood. We have a fireplace, a coleman stove, a surplus of candles and hurricane lamps. We even have a wind up radio.

We accept that when the power gives out there will be no water to shower with or flush the toilets and that what's in the tank is all that we have, that the fridge and the freezer will eventually thaw, that the house will be colored yellow and flickering and that we'll go to bed early every night because there's nothing else to do, and that the days and nights will be filled with hauling wood and filling coolers and answering a million different dilemmas in a million, creative ways.

The thing is, electricity is so intrinsic to our lives, underlies everything we do, that there's pieces we're bound to forget, overlook, or decide we can't deal with until its staring us in the face. Our wood furnace functions when there is no power, but not very well. All the zones automatically open when the power is off, but the circulators which would normally push the water through the house don't work, so we must rely on the fact that heat rises and cold sinks to get the heated water to run sluggishly through the pipes. Because the fire itself can't burn very hot under these conditions without over-firing the boiler, the water that does run through the pipes isn't all that hot. But it keeps the house above freezing, at least for a while.

Traveling becomes optional--except when it doesn't. Route 31 was closed-- once again-- but other residents who had gone past the cones told us it was still passable, though narrow. While FEMA officials urged people to stay indoors and off the road, to save life and limb and forget house and home by going to established shelters, most of us remembered Katrina and the crumbling football stadium and took matters into our own hands. My mom had called earlier to tell me that she thought she was going to lose her phone. "Okay," I said, just as the line went dead. We decided to make the trip out. We bundled the Bundle o' Joy, took the extra cell phone and the car charger, bought a gallon of water, and headed out. Henniker proper was fine, but as soon as we started to travel up the hill we went back into the war zone. Trees were leaning on power lines, slowly getting lower and lower. We held our breath and drove under the lines and the trees. Power and telephone lines swooped dangerously close to the car or lay across the road. 500 feet from my mom's driveway we were stopped by a huge oak tree, which had also taken down a pole and a transformer. Lionel tramped through the woods to avoid the mess, delivered the phone and the water, and made his way back so we could go home to our own little disaster.

Saturday night it got down into the single digits, with a cold clear sky and a gorgeous full moon and the trees tinkling like glass. If it were just Lionel and me, and the cat and the dog, we'd probably have bundled up and toughed it out in our bed upstairs. But with the Bundle o'Joy, we took a long look at the upstairs thermostat, now hovering around 52, and decided to move downstairs for the night, closer to the fireplace. Every hour we'd get up and tend the fireplace fire and the wood furnace, then collapse back into our makeshift bed. We were refugees in our own home.

Some people, fed up from the ice storm of 1998, were running generators to feed essential items the necessary juice they require, refrigerators, freezers, furnaces, water pumps. "Essential" is in the eye of the beholder; some were powering radios and lights, TVs or computers, and in our neighbors' case: Christmas Lights. Lots of them. All night. Trusting, I guess, that the roads to the nearest working gas station would remain open, that the chaos would all be over soon.

Some people, clearly unprepared to be without power, went a-hoarding. Water, bread, soup cans disappeared off the store shelves. Lantern oil, fuel canisters, candles. Stores, seeing their Black Friday dreams come true, re-arranged their merchandise so that these items were front and center. Lines formed for promised generators that never arrived. Tempers flared. Seeing a utility truck parked on the side of the road as we drove by, we shouted at them through our closed windows, dimly aware that they'd been working 24 hours a day and were probably eating a well earned meal. "Get back to work!" we yelled.

Sunday we ventured into Keene to do laundry, take a shower at my place of employment, and eat real food.  Both of us have done the laundromat routine before but not recently, so we stared at the machines wondering, exactly, how the whole process worked.   Grungy, wearing clothes we'd worn the day before, smelling of wood smoke and god knows what else, we were surely among the unwashed masses now, simply trying to get to the next day.  

This morning, our fourth without power, we'd pretty much settled into our new life. I'd set up the cell phone alarm to wake me at the right time. Instead of lounging on the couch for half an hour with a hot cup of coffee in my hands, I first lit a few candles so that I could see what I was doing and then set about making a fire in the fireplace while Lionel checked on the furnace. I set up the tea kettle on the grill in the fire, washed out my cup with a little of the hot water, and set about making tea. Lionel came upstairs and we discussed the game plan for the day; moving the freezer items into a large cooler to prepare for the 50 degree weather we were about to get. While we talked, there was a suddenly a quiet beep; our microwave was blinking green and in Spanish. The fridge, which we'd turned off and propped open, was glowing eerily and complaining about its recent loss of power. Overjoyed, I ditched the tea and set up the coffee maker. Lionel wandered around, shell-shocked. "I had a whole different day planned," he said, "I don't know what to do now!"

Turns out there's still plenty; the furnace, abused for so many hours, needed tending and cleaning. The water pressure needed help getting back up to speed. Also the greenhouse heater had expended all of our propane valiantly trying to heat our entire house. The fridge needed to be cleaned. The freezer needed to be re-packed. And that's just the inside. The outside still looks like a war zone; trees snapped in two or uprooted entirely, branches hanging by threads, and, despite our best efforts at preventing it, one tree right through our new orchard fence.

My mom, along with thousands of other residents, still don't have power. A co-worker, slipping on a ladder on the ice, is in the hospital at Dartmouth, condition unknown. The roads are still hazardous. But we've gotten through it again. We live in New England, after all. This is what we do best.

tags: weather  new hampshire