Last night, one of those wet Pacific storms. High wind, so much rain, and it’s raining still, a sound I love to hear on our blue metal roof. Yesterday I was lugging the tomato pots off the upper deck to the compost and the ground was hard and dry. Until last night, we’d only had a little light rain here and there, last week, and maybe one other time. But mostly it’s been dry since May. The wind brought down dead cedar fronds, so many that the driveway was rusty with them when we drove out for our swim earlier today.
When we woke, there was no power. The house so quiet, no fridge humming, just the rain on the roof and the prospect of making coffee by boiling a kettle of water on the woodstove, still cold. (John eventually went out to the shed where we keep kerosene, propane cannister for BBQ, and anything else flammable, and brought our old Coleman camping stove to the woodshed where he boiled the kettle in record time.) Mornings like this remind me of the long periods without power in our first ten or so years here. Every fall and winter trees would fall on the hydro lines and it would often take a couple of days or even a week to repair. We’d keep the woodstove hot and if it was winter, we could store perishables in a cooler on the deck. We have a well and water is pumped into a holding tank electrically so once the tank is empty, that’s it. But we’d fill 5 gallon containers at the lake for drinking and cooking and put buckets under the eaves to collect water to flush the toilets. Kerosene lamps and candles at dusk, a bedtime story by the woodstove in their soft light.
We felt closer to the living world then. Closer, tied to its weather, its caprices, its inconveniences. It was easier to wait out the storms, the loss of power, because there were fewer gadgets. No computer, no cellphone, no heat pump, and we didn’t care as much about hot water for daily showers. Once, after a week without electricity, we went to the local pool, which did have power, to swim but mostly to use the showers. Our clothing smelled of woodsmoke.
When the power did go out, it was often in the middle of the night. Even though our house was dark anyway, with one nightlight between the area where the children slept and the bathroom, they’d wake up. In a poem of John’s I’ve always loved, “With Gods”, there are a couple of stanzas that take me back to the sense I had then of living at the very edge of the world (the poem itself constructed almost as a series of haiku):
The hall light left on
Goes out, glimmers, dies outright
Somewhere a tree on the linesA wet wind slaps the windows
Our young sons run up frightened
To join us in bed
I remember the beams of their flashlights on the stairs while their sister, an infant, slept on in the darkness, oblivious.
The dark house wind-buffeted
Little box of smokey glass
Rattles on its shelf
When I was looking for this poem, I remembered the image of the house, and wasn’t there a little glass house on a piece of driftwood, made by our friend June, I asked John. Wasn’t that the reference? We both half-remembered there was but where could it have gone? Did it break? Or was our house itself precarious then, and now, a box of windows on a hill far from anything? But somehow the centre of our lives too?
Phone call at first light
Where is the power?
The schools are open
Where was the power? It was in the wind, in the draw of the fire, the little boys coming up the stairs with their flashlights, wanting the safety of our bed. It was in the stories we read by the kerosene lamp, Hans My Hedgehog sent from his home to make his fortune, a mute sister knitting sweaters for her swan brothers out of a stinging nettle fibre, and a baby sleeping in a cradle in the middle of a storm. Today I am remembering everything about those storms as I sit at my desk and listen to the rain.
Note: the poem “With Gods” by John Pass, from The Hours Acropolis (Harbour Publishing, 1991), used with the poet’s permission.
...Theresa Kishkan 