…coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.
- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
The branches started falling, really falling, Saturday night after the height of the storm had passed, in windless silence, the streets not yet plowed, the undergraduates not yet marveling up and down the length of the town. I read about what was impending on Facebook first, from a friend in Belchertown (laugh if you will, non-Western Mass folks, but only if you’ve got a better pub than this), and even as I read, I heard percussive snapping cracks and dull thuds resounding up both ends of the street toward the town center and into the wooded neighborhoods behind me. One branch, 20 feet long, crashed at my door and blocked me in until morning.
The electricity, Titanic-like, stayed on long after it was certain to go out, not because of the earliness of the storm or its intensity, but its earliness and intensity following an autumn that never happened. Most of our trees were still in summer leaf. Leaning out my window I saw, in the streetlights reflected from the snow, wires bowed, holes in tree canopies where single branches had gone, and in the next block, an entire row down. Around the corner a transformer was flaring blue and wild, and in sync with it, slightly delayed, our lights faltered, and finally went out.
The one advantage of snow-induced power outages: at least they come with an enormous nearby freezer. I nestled coolers and shopping bags in the uncleared snow, filled sinks and buckets with water, gathered flashlights. Strangely, I had no candles in the house, but AAA battery pen lights turned out to be enough for grading papers and reading.
Now we wait, calibrate what is doable, prudent, or necessary. Tinned fish, crackers, bread. One adapts quickly, doesn’t expend energy even thinking about what’s not possible, what makes no sense to purchase at the cash-only reopening stores. No cereal because dubious milk after two days, even after being kept outside; no rice or pasta because no stove. Apples. Power is back spottily; going back to my own, unheated, un-Internet-ed, cold water house is going back a hundred years and more, except they would have had a coal shed or woodpile then, and at least one room with heat, though an icy walk to an outhouse. The town smells of woodsmoke, and I’m reminded of the nineteenth century’s denuded hills, spatters of coal smoke inking long-defunct rail routes along rivers; the pre-refrigeration-era knowledge my grandmothers were taught. not all of it so wise (the jar of bacon fat perennially refreshed, within easy reach at the back of the stove when you wanted it). One bakery in town has hot coffee, at least.
The first thing when the power comes back is take a hot shower, then make hot coffee (I tried making it with cold water in my one-cup; terrible). And in five days, a week, I am sure I will not stop to think except idly and in passing, in a way that itself feels a luxury, how most of history would regard not only as luxuries but as marvels the things we call utilities and basics, whose cost I measure against paychecks that I do not touch but view as digital records that exist as code on a cloud server transmitted in encrypted packets on fiber optic cables.
Last night I saw the stars brighter than I have seen them since moving here.
