The Power Outage Refugee

I survived the Great Ice Storm of 2019 without becoming a weather related statistic. 268,000 people in Michigan lost our electricity this past week starting on Wednesday and most of us got ours back on Sunday afternoon minus 1,368 rural residents still waiting for power on Monday. My county was ground zero and thick ice was covering every surface, taking trees and power lines down. Temperatures outside got down in the low teens at night and in the 20s during the day. Add high winds to the mix and it was dangerous for the linemen who were working 12 hour shifts around the clock. One school a mile from me had a sewage line freeze and burst and a hallway filled up with raw sewage. And here I thought having a water pipe freeze would be a nightmare.

The first day of the outage I was spared but the following morning I woke up to no heat or lights. Even though the house was 50 degrees inside I thought I could tough it out. I’d been camping in cold weather but I’d forgotten how nice it was to warm up with hot coffee, a campfire and going inside a tent rated for use in Alaska. I became obsessed with wanting a cup of coffee. It wasn’t until the second morning I was without power that it dawned on me that I could bypass the electric igniter on my gas stove by using a match. Last month I had almost thrown out an old box of instant coffee during a purging session and as I heated up water I smugly told Marie Kondo, “See, this is why we keep stuff!” 

Tidy Girl Kondo’s name came up a few times during the outage.“Marie, I wish I’d kept that propane heater that my husband used at disability deer hunting camp!” “Marie, I’m glad I didn’t throw out my drawer full manuals because you said they’re all online. You can’t google without Wi-Fi!” If I had done that I wouldn’t have been able to figure out how to get my garage door open during the outrage---not that I’d drive with all the ice, but I envied neighbors using their cars to get warm or charge devices. But I couldn’t reach the power override cord and I doubted I could have lifted the oversized door if I could have and I wasn't about to fill up the garage with carbon monoxide. I also had an old cassette tape player that I couldn’t figure out how to open without its manual. I’d kept the player because I have cassette tapes of an interview I did of my dad back in the ‘80s. But I bitched at Marie Kondo for guilting me into donating a bunch books on tape. I only kept two. 

The first night after dark I laid under a mountain of blankets listening to A Knight in Shining Armor, wishing I had one. Late afternoon the second day the house was down to 42 and I wasn’t looking forward to the other book, The Grapes of Wrath which is about the hardships of the Dust Bowl, hardly something a woman fearing that she might not wake up in the morning wanted to hear and at one point I thought about Scarlett O’Hara at Tara saying, “When this war is over I’ll never go hungry again!” I couldn’t even make a peanut butter sandwich because I keep my bread in the freezer and you can only eat so many sardines and crackers before you start speaking with a Norwegian accent. By then I was wishing I could google ‘chilblains’ to see if I had them. I was getting the shivers that started deep under my ribs and I was so sleepy that I knew I should do something but I didn’t know what. My phone only had 10% battery life left, even my emergency dialer needed charging. I turned them both off so I’d have some power if I had a true emergency requiring 911. And that decision probably saved me a world of hurt. 

One of my Gathering Girls pals knew I was without power and when she tried to text me and it wouldn’t go through she got worried and sent her son-in-law over to check on me. He turned out to be my Knight in Shining Armor. He introduced himself and offered to help me turn off my water and drain my pipes and talked me into coming back to M.J.’s house where she had already taken in five other power outage refugees and a dog. Her son-in-law could have literally saved my life because I know I would have just politely refused an offer to come over if it had been sent in a text. When help was standing in my living room it was too tempting to refuse. I was so cold and there was no hiding it, as bundled up as I was. 

M.J. is the only one of my Gathering Girls pals who is a Trump supporter. On the second morning I was at her house, she got a phone call and one of the first things she said was, “We have the same thing here. We’re avoiding watching CNN and FOX.” The conversation went on for ten minutes about the “witch hunt.” When she got off the phone I told her it’s fascinating that two likeable ladies like us with similar upbringings and life experiences could view the world so differently and that I blame that on having so many cable channels with too many “news commentary” shows. She agreed. Then she did a monologue about how Trump doesn’t get enough credit for undoing all the “bad things that Obama did" and he was getting the world to respect us again after Obama’s disastrous presidency. Yadda, yadda, yadda. I sat there listening without speaking and when she finished I said, “We should probably change the subject but first I want to say that it’s amazing to me that all the words you use to describe Obama are the same words I use to describe Trump.” It was all very civil, like two friends trying to figure out the answer to a calculus equation.

When I got back home I was telling my niece about the conversation and she said words to the effect that the big take-away was that we (meaning everyone) need to quit judging each other along party lines and start judging each other by the humanity we show each other because dividing our country is exactly what the Russian disinformation campaign was/still is all about and we can't let that happen. In my case, a Trump supporter took me in at a time of need. We played a few board games, had a great time and she doted on Levi to the point she became his “aunt M.” By the time her son-in-law was able to take me back home my Gathering Girl pal and I had deepened our friendship and I wish I could figure out a way to thank her. I was truly touched by her kindness and generosity. ©