things you can do when the power is out

On Tuesday, a big storm blew across the Sechelt Peninsula, a storm like the ones in the old days when we first lived here. I remember power-outages of more than a week. Nearly 2. We had 3 young children and I remember that it was fun for a day or two. When the house got cold, we brought our sleeping bags into the living room–open to the kitchen where the woodstove is–and it was like camping. But then? Not so much fun. Opening the fridge as few times as possible, storing perishables in a cooler on the deck, filling the oil lamps and finding more candles. When the power went out at 10 Tuesday night, that was fine because I’d already been asleep for an hour and John was just about to put his book down to turn out his reading light. Yesterday huge trucks were parked along the highway at 8 when we tried to go out for a swim. Power lines were draped low across the highway and one truck driver told us cars were getting through but it was impossible for a semi. He’d been there since the first ferry from Powell River docked at 6:30. We chose to turn back. Yesterday the crews were busy down near Gibsons, I think, because there was no sign of them at our end until late afternoon, too late to begin the work of replacing shattered power poles and broken wires. I’m in Sechelt now, charging my computer at the Library, and late morning we passed 4 crews on the 13 km stretch from Garden Bay Road north to our house where at least 10 major repairs had to be made.

But there are things you do when the power is out.

1. You can wake up every few hours to put wood on the fire because it’s the only source of heat. Around 4 a.m., you can put a kettle on the woodstove and hope it’s boiling when you get up at 6:30.
2. You can put a stockpot under the eavestrough to catch water to heat for the dishes. (You have drinking water in two big containers as well as a couple of gallon-sized apple juice bottles but it’s too precious to use for dishes.)
3. You can fill the oil lamps.
4. You can pull your chair close to the fire and begin quilting the new project you pieced together and basted last week. Light comes in through the sliding glass doors until about 4 and then it’s too dark.
5. You can ration your laptop battery, the one that’s charging now, and you ration reluctantly because you are on the home-stretch of the novel you have been writing for 4 years and you don’t want to stop now. By moving the laptop from your study to the kitchen, you can work by lamplight, by candlelight, and because you are writing about a small coastal community in winter, it feels right somehow. (You still don’t know how it will end.)
6. Because your house is the home of a quiltmaker and woodcutter, there are warm quilts for the bed and a woodshed full of dry fir and cedar for the fire. You keep replenishing both.
7. Yesterday you heated soup on the woodstove. You can do that again tonight if you need to.
8. You can sit in the rocking chair and do nothing but look into the fire. The flames tell you everything you need to know about your life.