Spit Goes Clink
We lost power last night, from about 1:30 in the morning until 7:30.
Without electricity we have no lights, no heat (gas furnace controlled by electric thermostat), and no water (well pump is electric). I am writing this at 10:00 AM, and it is -14 Fahrenheit outdoors (yes, that says negative fourteen, or as Rose says, “megative fourteen” because it is worse than negative), so I don’t know how cold it was outside in the middle of the night. I shudder to think of it. Or maybe shiver. The house isn’t quite back up to operating temperature. We still have condensation frost on the inside of the windows.
I got up, found a flashlight, and called the power company. I left a message on their automated system and waited. I lit a few candles and read for a while, but after an hour, the temperature was noticeably dropping in the house. Samuel had a cold and woke easily, and so he ended up in bed with us, ensuring that neither Dawn nor I would get any sleep. I was up and down a number of times, unable to sleep but too tired and, increasingly, too cold to want to get up. We piled fleece blankets on the children and ourselves. Rose grunted when I asked if she was OK, but her head and hands feet felt warm.
And then I realized that if the house froze, there would be burst water pipes to deal with.
It was 4:00 in the morning. I called our landlady, but she didn’t know how to drain the water out of the pipes. She would try to find out and call me back.
“Meanwhile, can you leave some water running to keep the pipes from freezing?” she asked.
“No, the well pump is electric.”
“Oh… Yeah… Darn.”
I called the electric company and heard the reassuring recorded message that said there was a power outage in our area (and six other places) and crews were dealing with it. Later, I would feel very, very bad for those crews. But not right at that moment. At that moment, I wanted to urge them on with a cat-o-nine tails.
I also wanted to know how dire the situation was. At first I thought to get some water from the water cooler and stick an instant read thermometer in it. But then a few sluggish neurons woke up enough to say, “Hey stupid. Get the flashlight and look at the thermostat,” before rolling over back to sleep.
The thermostat read 60 degrees. 60 degrees? But it felt so cold in the house!
We decided to get ready to evacuate anyway, which raised another problem. The car was 75 yards away in a locked, detached garage. The garage door opener was electric and could not be opened from the outside. We would have to get inside the garage and manually open it, but the man door was locked and we didn’t know if we had a key. I put on fleece pants, a silk turtleneck, snow pants, fleece sweater, winter coat, a neck gaiter, Sorrell snow boots, a fleece touque (as our neighbors to the north say), and a down winter coat, and I walked outside with all the keys we could find in the house.
It occurred to me that this might be my first chance to have my spit freeze in mid-air, but I was too chicken to find out. I didn’t want my lips to freeze together.
We live on a “vacation” lake, so only a couple of house on our block still have people living in them at this time of year. However two doors down, I saw a station wagon with its lights on and my neighbor moving in and out. I went over to talk to him and found out that he was going to drive seven miles to town and look for a generator. His wife was leaving in their other car to drive to Fort Wayne and go to work three hours early. He asked if I had a cell phone, and I said yes, but it got no signal at the lake. Too bad, he said. He wanted to call ahead and see if anyplace was open. Why don’t you use your regular phone I said? He looked puzzled and then realized what I meant.
“All my phones are cordless and they need to be plugged into a socket to work.” I offered my phone but he decided to just go. But he did help me get my car out first. Turns out I did have a key to open the man door, and fortunately he was there to help because to open the garage door, we had to pull on two separate metal flaps, one on each end of the garage door.
So the car was available for a quick get away, if need be. I came inside, and was about to crawl back in bed when the landlady called back. She had not found out how to drain the water, but she was going out to buy a portable generator. I told her that the house was now at 55 degrees so there wasn’t any immediate danger.
I crawled into bed. Even Samuel’s involuntary spasms and twitches and kicks couldn’t keep me awake. But at 6:30 he woke up, as he does every morning, and wanted to get up and play. We said no about as firmly as we say No about anything, but he kept pleading until finally I said, “Sam, come with me.”
We had already covered him in fleece and warm layers, so I walked him into the room where all his toys were. It was very, very dark.
“Sam, the electricity is out. There is no power in the house. Do you think you can play out here in the dark?”
No answer. We went back to bed until the power came on at 7:30 in the morning. We gave a feeble cheer, and then I took Samuel to the playroom and fell asleep on the couch, wrapped in blankets.
An hour later, Rose woke up. She had no idea what had happened during the night, but she was pleased to hear that school had been cancelled for the day.
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