Socked in by the Ice

I've never had the National Guard called out for the area where I live. Those kinds of natural disasters always happen to other people.

This week, it happened to us. The huge ice storm that slammed the midwest and prompted our governor to declare Missouri in a State of Emergency has left us without power since basically Sunday. We had power for several hours sunday night and monday morning, but after that, it's been cold and dark. I took several photos of the destruction caused by 1/2" of ice over every branch and blade of grass (literally...that's not an exaggeration). Yesterday, I stood outside on the pond dam and listened to the trees breaking--one every minute or thirty seconds. A sound like a gunshot, then a lot of crashing and snapping as the limb went to the ground with a thud.

My family is huddled in with my folks right now, since they have a generator big enough to power the furnace. They also have a wood stove, so their house is warm. We had to travel 35 miles last night, to my in-laws, just to get electricity and hot water. When we came back this morning, the thermostat read 46!

All this technology is great and wonderful and oh our lives are so much better because we can stick a plastic card in a gas pump and get our fuel without even having to gone inside or bother with cash. We've got internet and email to keep in touch and furnaces to keep us warm and air conditioners to keep us cool. At least we have all that when we have electricity to run it. All this technology makes the assumption that we'll have power to run our gas pumps and our furnaces and our air conditioners. It's just assumed that those power lines with 27 million splices in them from all the times they've come down and been repaired will just work. In the best case scenario, when nothing is remotely out of the ordinary, they work just fine. We depend on the technology and structure our lives around it.

So are we really all that different than our ancestors? Not when the power is out. We still have to go to the creek to get water to flush the toilet because the water tower has run out of water because there's no power for the pumps to put fresh water into them. Our cordless phones don't work so we plug the rotary phone back in and maybe they work when the power is out and maybe they don't because the pole that the phone line is on is the same one the power line is on and it snapped in half, along with the dozen others on either side of it and it takes the power company three days to replace them all.

The greatest weakness of all this great and wonderful brave new world we live in is electricity. Without it, we're no different than my grandmother's family, when they were growing up. Except we've grown up without having to provide for ourselves so we've lost the skills required to keep ourselves warm, fed, and sheltered when the power goes out. Without generators and shelters and all the things we depend on to conduct our daily affairs, we have only our families and ourselves.

This will only last a few days. They'll work 24-hour shifts and get the poles replaced, the lines spliced and re-hung, and we'll be back to normal by this time next week (Lord willing). And then we'll go back to business as usual and structure our lives around those frail wires strung over the landscape and just assume that, when we need that electricity most, we'll have access to it.

So will we have it when we need it? We need it now and don't have it. We depend on it and find that it's not really all that dependable. Electricity is truly a fair-weather friend.