Grid

Last Monday was a work holiday, so I slept a little later than usual; all the way until 7:30 AM, in fact. Everyone else was off, too, but they all like to sleep late, so I had the house to myself. I made coffee, and I settled on the couch to stream a British detective show, and I thought about how much I appreciate a paid holiday, one of the greatest gifts of the labor movement of the 20th century. 

And then the power went out. 

It always feels so abrupt when the power goes out. Everything shuts down or off, all at once, before you even have time to react. And you notice how much noise you’ve become accustomed to, because a house without power is a very quiet house. 

My first thought was “Thank God I already made my coffee,” and then my second thought was that I’d text my friends to see if it was just me, or if the rest of the neighborhood was out. My friend Erin texted first, and that’s how we knew that it was the whole street. I checked the power company’s website. They already knew about the outage, a thousand customers were affected, and they expected to restore power by 9 AM. And they did. I was reading a book and texting with my friends, and the power came back on as suddenly as it had gone out. Everything sounded normal again. The whole thing was done and over in less than an hour. 

Last Monday was a nice day, and the outage wasn’t weather-related. It was apparently human-caused; an error that accidentally cut the switch or the transformer or the circuit or whatever the thing is that carries the power to the affected homes and businesses. The power company’s update on the outage admitted as much. Imagine that--they made a mistake, they admitted they made a mistake, they got to work immediately to fix the mistake, and then they actually did fix it, in practically no time. When the lights came back on, the coffee in the coffee pot was still warm. 

*****

I don’t want to get into the politics of what’s happening in Texas. Well OK, maybe for a minute. It was the Green New Deal! Really, Governor Abbott? And Ted Cruz--really? REALLY? OK, that’s all. 

Politics aside, I have been thinking about this a lot during these last few days, and not just because it’s been all over the news. It’s because I think a lot about everything we depend on, and how easily it can all fall apart. I flip a switch and voila--light! I turn the handle on a faucet and clear water streams forth, stopping only when I tell it to stop. My car runs out of gas and I go to the gas station and fill it back up; and we eat food, and then I drive my car to the grocery store and restock the kitchen. Most people take all of this for granted. I don’t take it for granted. That is not because I’m a better and more thoughtful person but because I’m a compulsive worrier. I worry about everything. I worry that things will fall apart, that the center won’t hold. 

OK, now that’s REALLY the last time you’ll ever see me paraphrase Yeats. 

It’s all very fragile, the whole thing--the power grid, water systems, the Internet, the transportation infrastructure that allows things and people to move freely from place to place so that we can drive our cars to nearby stores and buy everything we need. It can all go away, and very quickly. Just one disaster, one cyberattack, and the whole thing is kaput.  

Kaput, I tell you. Even now, I worry. Most people in Texas have power again; but apparently, many people who didn’t lose their power in the first place are receiving five-figure electric bills because the free market or whatever. It’s snowing again here, snow mixed with sleet that is making everything icy cold and that could easily weigh down the power lines and shut down the electric power; and that could easily make the roads impassable, thus making it impossible for delivery trucks to restock the stores that we all depend on for food and household supplies. 

*****

I like to think of myself as a resourceful, flexible, fearless person who can adapt to any circumstance, roll with the punches, and turn lemons into lemonade. But that’s totally ridiculous, of course, because I am exactly the opposite of that and if we find ourselves in a Texas-like crisis here in Maryland, I’ll start panicking and lose my shit within the hour. 

OK, maybe within a day. We have seen how I handled an unexpected power outage of less than an hour’s duration with total aplomb, and I bet that I can sustain that devil-may-care attitude for as long as six hours. After that, I make no promises.