Once again, I had a brush with my latent psychic skills nearly two weeks ago when I first arrived at one of my sister’s house. I normally keep certain items prepacked in my suitcase–wine opener, goggles, camper’s headlamp. For some inexplicable reason, I handed my 11-year-old nephew my headlamp. I proudly boasted that I liked being prepared for all occasions.
Fastforward exactly a week and a line of thunderstorms later, the lights browned, flashed back to normal and repeated. I’d lived in enough developing countries to know an impending electricity blackout warning when I saw one. I raced to my suitcase and got the headlamp as the lights blinked off. While everyone else ran around the house, I adjusted my headlamp and proudly walked around, lighting the dark rooms until they found their own light source. My nephew grabbed the little flashlight in the TV room, beating his mom to the punch. My father wore the “emergency” hat he had been given, which came equipped with two little lights built into a cap.
With the background hum of electrical appliances and TVs eerily quiet, we could hear the threatening sounds of mother nature. We all met in the basement, where it was safe and cool. Without any of the distractions of electrical conveniences, we actually began to talk with one another–well, except for me and one of my nieces. I wanted to finish the section of the chapter that I was on. My niece eventually received all the updated texts from her friends who were also in the emergency storm situation. The phone battery eventually wore down until she had to reconnect with the rest of the family conversation.
Once the storm passed over, we waited another thirty minutes in the basement, but the electricity did not return. My father, who has elevated napping to an art form, was the first to make the trek upstairs to get ready for bed. We were fortunate to still have running water even though we only had a limited amount of hot water. Since the basement was the only cool part of the house, my sister and her family slept on the sofa and made sleeping pallets on the floor. I just slept on my usual roll out bed in the loveseat sofa. Well, “slept” is an optimistic retelling. I was subjected to two versions of competitive snoring and a tiny flashlight, doubling as a night light…I’m a dark room sleeper.
I was pretty bitter when I finally emerged the next morning. The sight of my nephew playing a board game with one of his sisters turned my attitude around. Instead of being spoiled little brats, complaining about the electricity outage, my niece and nephew automatically switched to a nonelectronic form of entertainment. I joined them in the “TV room” to read a book after my breakfast of freshcut fruit.
While the rest of the family took showers, using as little hot water as they could stand, I boasted about being the only clean one, thanks to my habit of showering at night. Yet, the house had begun to heat up and become stuffy; so I figured I wouldn’t have too long to wait before I lost my bragging rights.
I took my father up on his offer to go to the grocery store. The first one we tried was closed due to the power outage. The second one smelled of food about to go bad and had partially stocked shelves. The third one was just right: brightly lit, fully stocked and no funny smells.
We made another outing later in the afternoon, mainly to be in the air-conditioning, wait for the return of the electricity and vie for charging our electronic devices, using the car charger. We figured out that we could charge two phones at once, but the challenge was there were 6 of us. I inwardly laughed at how we were reduced to animals, fighting over a limited resource.
By dinnertime, the electricity still had not returned; so we went out to eat. Again, we competed to charge our phones. This time, I opted out of the competition since my plan was to charge my phone at the restaurant. With my luck, there wasn’t a close outlet to our table, but I encouraged my sister and father to charge their phones near the servers’ station. I figured throughout our entertaining and delicious dinner, two phones would be out of the competition back in the car.
A few hours and too much food later, we waddled out of there. Mom and my sister just had to go shopping afterwards, but I succumbed to a food coma. Just before nodding off, I noticed that the car video monitor had a USB port. I jumped up and tested it out. One of my nieces, who was low on the phone charging list, became excited as well. As soon as her mother returned from shopping, my niece borrowed her mother’s phone cord and plugged in her phone. We all celebrated as if we’d just discovered a vital survival strategy.
We became excited when we noticed that the traffic light closest to home had resumed working. The townhouses closest to the intersection had electricity. Our hopes dimmed as we drove past the dark townhouses leading up to our house. I anxiously looked through the house windows as we rolled into the driveway. “The kitchen lights are on!” I reported.
We raced throughout the house, turning off unnecessary lights while plugging in our nearly depleted electronic devices. Just like that, we catapulted back into being electronic slaves, abandoning the civilization we’d briefly rediscovered.