Lights Out

photo attribution below

I was finishing up some work Thursday evening when the lights flickered and failed. 

Damn, there goes the wifi.

So, I turned on my phone and set up the hotspot. Oh, the joy of modern technology. I was able to complete my last task of the day. By the time I'd finished, power had been restored. Huzzah!

Outside, a storm continued to rage, hurling hail and rain at the windows, making a click, click, click noise. I sent up a quick request to the powers that be to spare our house and automobile from major damage. Things got pretty intense, with trees bending into unnatural poses and debris swirling about. 

The tempest went through pretty quickly, and I was relieved to see that everything seemed to be okay. Settling down to watch my latest binge-worthy episode of Doc Martin, I was lulled into a sense of all-is-right-with-the-world.

As the show hit the climactic final scene, however, the image on the screen disappeared. The lights came on. Then off. 

I waited. Only darkness. Damn.

Unplugging everything that could be harmed by a surge, I went to join Mr. Ginley, who was in the process of unplugging his laptop. He'd already fetched a flashlight and was in default crisis mode, a la, "I can't open the refrigerator, and we're all going to die, etc."

I do jest. Just a bit. Mr. is calm in a crisis, although this certainly wasn't life-threatening or anything. "What does Facebook say?" he inquired. 

I had already alerted the electric company, although I was pretty sure it was a widespread outage. As I predicted, someone had started a thread on the neighborhood FB page, with folks reporting from different neighborhoods on the status of their power. The outages were not confined to our neighborhood, and the consensus seemed to be that the lights would not be coming on anytime soon.

We sat around the glow of a flashlight for a bit, then I fetched our little battery-powered lamp and started working on a jigsaw puzzle. It was getting close to bedtime, but I knew sleep would be elusive because the humidity was stifling. So I continued to work until I felt I could lapse into unconsciousness.

As I lay in the darkness waiting for sleep, I was fascinated by the total silence. Aside from an occasional car, there was a vast nothingness that was lovely and scary at the same time. It was a reminder that we depend too much on modern conveniences, that they distance us from ourselves. 

Enveloped in silence, I drifted off to sleep. 

At around 3:30 am, my brain kicked in, and I started to plan where I was going to go to work that day. Should I just go to the office? Or maybe the local library? Should I take Mr. with me or just bring him provisions?

After ten minutes of these ruminations, the lights came back on. The refrigerator kicked in. Normalcy was restored. I turned off the lamp and went back to sleep. Later I learned that few streets over, a tree had been struck by lightning, caught on fire and fallen on the electric wires, causing the power to fail.

The next morning, I reset the TV, plugged in the computers and returned to my regularly scheduled programming. 

But a niggling feeling remained – that we're so dependent on technology for both necessities and comforts in life that a few hours without it felt like an eternity. What would my ancestors have thought about me? 

"Big wuss," probably.

Not that I'm willing to cut the power anytime soon, mind you...

Photo attribution: See page for author, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons