Restoring the Power
The power went off an hour ago. Computers went dark, afternoon TV blinked and disappeared, washing machines stopped mid-spin, life as we know it came to a complete and abrupt halt, a small reminder that the Digital World is more fragile and vulnerable than we Modernists like to admit.
I was back in the woods splitting and hauling next year’s fuel, 12 cords filling up the sheds. Behind me the Baker Woman has her outdoor oven stoked and filled with today’s loaves. This noon I’m going to visit the Goat Lady who quit her Boeing career to homestead up behind the Barefoot Bandit’s trailer. She’s got milk and eggs and cheeses for sale and I plan to stock up.
A neighbor called yesterday offering mussels she’d gathered. I ate my first salad out of our garden last night. The folks who bought the farm to the north of us plan to open a micro-brewery and maybe a small boutique distillery. We ate oysters from Triangle Bay a couple of friends raised from seed and are cultivating into a fairly large nursery.
When I survey the neighborhood, what I find are folks making furniture, building boats, milling wood from timber, fashioning musical instruments, making art of every conceivable kind, raising livestock, catching seafood, growing gardens, brewing beer, making breads and cheeses, living closer to the land. I don’t see the Past so much as I see our Future.
Like the Irish monks who toiled in the caves during the Dark Ages, us South Enders are keeping the flames of Old Knowledge alive. And when the time arrives, when the power is nearly gone, a sporadic spark along decaying fiber optic grids, we’ll re-emerge, blinking in the newly discovered sunlight of another Dawn, ready to pass along the knowledge once thought obsolete. Meanwhile, we’re not too troubled by power outages. Power, as we all should know, isn’t just electrical.
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