Back to the Past
I was driving past the Plaza IGA — our ‘hometown grocery’, meaning, I guess, a monopoly for higher prices — when the transformer blew in a windstorm. The rest of the drive down to the tail end of the island was dark except for my headlights casting wild beams on tormented branches and roadside bushes come to life like amphetamine goblins. It would be a long time before PUD got around to us, that was a given.
Slipping off the grid for a few days hurtles us back to the early years here. Ordinary life comes to a sudden stop. No more TV, no more internet, no phone calls, no e-mails. The world shrinks inward, lanterns come out, candles are lit, the homefires are kept burning. All those devices we amuse ourselves with to ‘pass the time’ are put on the backburner, the one that operated on electricity but doesn’t now.
Most of the neighbors have invested in generators. Fifteen minutes after the power blows, the ‘hood here sounds like a hornets’ nest hit with a baseball bat. For them the diversions halt briefly. For us, it’s a few days of nostalgia, memories of wild howlers, crashing waves, trees toppled, neighbors comparing damage, the whine of chainsaws up and down the highway.
We read books we hadn’t finished, play instruments that sat for too long, stoke the stoves, carry water, talk, go for walks. It’s 1977 down at the wild South End once again. A time before cellphones and computers. A time only 40 years or so ago. But the world has changed. Not the way it did with our parents or grandparents. It changed completely.
Me, I like knowing no matter how inexorable its march into a digital future is, it can stop dead in its tracks, if briefly. But it feels like time has stopped and the natural world has reasserted itself. Today, I spoze, we’ll go back to the Future. If nothing else, we won’t have to listen to a dozen damn generators.
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