When the Lights Flicker
Life at the quieter edge
When the lights flicker, especially in the wintertime here on lovely, remote Orcas Island, my husband and I rush to prepare.
The power doesn’t always go out after a flicker — and sometimes there isn’t even that to warn us — but more often than not, an outage is preceded by that little stutter. I, no doubt fancifully, imagine a tree falling onto a power line, bouncing a bit; the determined little line struggles to hold it together, to take the tree’s weight or thrust it aside without breaking; but — alas! — it cannot do it, and it snaps. Then (even more fancifully), I see the severed line dribbling its last bit of power to us…and then we go dark. At least until the nice folks from our power company brave the elements to go out and stitch the lines back together again.
Fairy tales and children’s stories aside, that flicker gives us just enough time to save whatever we’re working on and unplug the computers, make sure we know where the flashlights and solar lamps are, and, if it’s getting near dinnertime, maybe pull a few things out of the fridge so we don’t have to open it when it’s off and let all the cold air out.
We do fine with outages, by the way. We heat our house with a wood stove, and we’ve even gotten little self-contained, heat-activated fans to sit atop it to circulate the…
