TUESDAY AFTERNOON the sky darkened and the wind picked up, falling right in line with the tornado warning that caused my cellphone to buzz into life. Tornado skies are different from any other, adding a feral green to the shades of grey and black. I’ve seen it a couple of times since relocating to Montgomery County, NY, 34 years ago. The view from my porch looks downhill to the Mohawk River, which is four miles away, and the river invites weather phenomena like fog and rain and, when conditions are right, twisters.
I was still a few miles from the store when the wind grew so malevolent that horizontal rain and blusting leaves and branches blocked my view. I pulled over. Actually, I just stopped. No road-shoulder was visible. The sounds – wind, rain, branches, leaves – were bad enough, but there also seemed to be a pressure differential that caused the walls of my van to vibrate. I was scared.
It suddenly ended. Nature, showing an exquisite sense of humor, pushed most of the clouds away and gave us a brilliant blue. I resumed driving, but was stopped a half-mile later by a tree-trunk of a branch across the road. I made a difficult u-turn, drove home (no ice cream!) and later learned that the tornado had crossed the road I was traveling a scant few miles ahead of me. Had my timing been more impulsive, it could have flipped the bus.
This recollection came back on Tuesday as my wife and I marveled at the suddenness of the sky’s transformation into a gothic horror backdrop. And it’s not just the sky. Again, there’s that noise and pressure that creeps the hell out of you. “Go to the basement,” we’d been warned, and we’ve long taken comfort in having a basement framed in stones and 2 by 6 joists. But the promised tornado passed many miles northwest of us (dropping trees and flipping a car in Rome, NY), and the cloud-darkness eased as twilight settled around us.
And then all hell broke loose. A savage thunderstorm hit. Can a sky grow darker than dark? This one did. The purported safety of the house seems much less safe when rain like that is roiling outside. I suppose I was being defiant (“Damn you, weather!,” fist shaken at the sky) but in fact I was being stupid, staying on the first floor while assuring Susan it would be fine to do so. As if to punish this hubris, our power went out.
But nothing bad happened to harm us. The fury of the storm abated as quickly as it had come. Emergency-vehicle sirens began to howl. Where once we fought the darkness with candles and kerosene lamps, we now have battery-operated lanterns to guide us. We have a gas stove. And we have a gas-fired generator that has sat in the garage, unused, for at least two decades. I bought it with climate-change incidents in mind, but have resisted using it for what I gauge will be brief outages. This one promised to last significantly longer. Plus it’s the height of summer heat and have a freezer and fridge to protect.
I wheeled the thing around to the back of the house, dismayed to see that I’d left gasoline in it since last I tested it, years ago, but the engine started after only a couple of pulls. The sonofabitch was loud! I mixed fresh gas into its tank, plugged in a thick extension cord, and ran cords enough from that to run the freezer, refrigerator, and, down in the basement, the water pump. Drunk with the power of recovered power, I also ran cord to the TV stand, where I plugged in components enough to allow us to watch a movie. (Powell and Pressburger’s “Black Narcissus,” if you’re curious. Deborah Kerr and Kathleen Byron fighting on the edge of a cliffside seemed appropriate to the weather.)
We have become blackout-defiant. There was a time when we burned candles and oil lamps to light the way; now we have powerful rechargeable flashlights. We had a pleasant enough evening; I was able to read in bed because my tablet was fully charged. We missed the coolness and throb of the air conditioner, but we’re stoics. We know deprivation. We can soldier on.
But not, we discovered, without an internet connection. The modem on my desk has column of five lamps indicating various aspects of the internet connection, the most important of which (for my immediate purpose) is the second from the top, a stylized globe that glows red when the connection is down. It was an implacable red.
The university library where Susan works had been shut down for a few days because of cooling costs, so she was working from home, generally a simple process. But we hit the road the following morning in order to buy breakfast and a few internet hours at a nearby Panera Bread. As the lunch crowd streamed in, clutching their own computers, we found a high-enough speed connection at a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot.
Power was restored to our house late the following evening, but the internet outage persisted for several days beyond that. Frontier Communication, our provider, sent a daily text message telling me what I already knew, and the phone app acknowledged that there was an outage with no speculation as to its repair time.
I showed Susan how to use her cell phone to set up an internet hot spot, but cell service is lousy where we live and the connection was thus unreliable. The coffeeshop odyssey continued for the next couple of days, ending only on the day when the Frontier app stopped responding and I had the notion to restart the modem. The lamps on it flickered to life, and the globe glowed blue.
An Amish cart is rattling down my driveway as I write this, carrying a farmer to whom we lease our fields. There’s a large Amish population in my town, a group living without electricity and, needless to say, the internet. I have visited their houses; I see the evidence of a successful way of life. I used to believe myself radical or anarchic or reactionary enough to be able to settle into a similar frills-free life, but I know now that isn’t so. I couldn’t wait to get back to the current century.
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