By Friday, nearly a week after the storm, I was fed up. I told people it wasn’t the creature comforts that we missed. I said we’re a hardy lot, veterans of many cold and rainy camping trips. I told people it was the interruption of the routine that made life without electric power difficult, the utter abandonment of business as usual.
But after a week, my stoicism was flagging.
Our neighbors had had power since Tuesday afternoon; thanks to a snapped wire at the pole across the street, we remained without. As life in town returned to normal, kids went back to school and local media turned its attention to other stories, we felt abandoned. When I returned that Friday evening from my warm, well-lighted office to my dark, chilly house—cool enough at night to see your breath and warm enough in the day to hasten the thawing of food in the freezers—I was shattered. There was nothing I’d have welcomed more than some creature comfort: the reassuring kick of the oil burner, the warm glow of a lightbulb and the joyful prattle of a network sitcom.
At first, I had tried to embrace the outage as an adventure. I’d been on a hunting trip in Maine when the storm hit. Rather than leaving for home Sunday, I spent Monday morning in a tree stand and headed home under clear blue skies. I’d heard stress in my wife’s voice as she described Saturday night’s storm and the sleepless hours she and my daughter spent listening to trees crashing in the back yard, but I was sure the worst would be over by the time I got home.
My optimism began to wane when I hit Worcester; as I drove north on I-91, the gravity of the situation set in. The Valley looked like a war zone. And my property, which I’d spent considerable time getting buttoned up for winter, was a mess of downed trees and hanging limbs—widow-makers for sure. It would take a month of weekends or thousands of dollars I didn’t have to put things back in order.
Still, I tried to find the silver lining. I had much to be thankful for, including the easy time my 10-year-old daughter seemed to be having without modern conveniences. If anything, she seemed too steely, particularly when my wife said she’ll likely always remember the freak storm of October, 2011.
“Unless instead of it being a freak storm, it’s only the first of many storms like it,” my daughter had replied, demonstrating an understanding of the new normal that made my heart ache.
We were also thankful for the many people who reached out to offer help, including all four electrical contactors we called when we realized we had a problem above and beyond those of our neighbors. Each one stopped by the house as they rushed from one emergency job to the next, explaining that, though ours was a 10-minute job, the power company would have to do it. None of them charged me. We saw a lot of that sort of selfless behavior during the week.
The fact is, a lot of people were worse off. My mother was one of thousands of Connecticut residents without power and facing grim warnings that restoration was still several days away. The papers were filled with one hard-luck story after another. People were hurting everywhere.
The kindness of others; the long, hard hours the power company employees and contractors were working, trying to restore power; I struggled to keep those things in mind as I battled my growing anger. Still, at night I sulked, cursing the politicians and industry big shots whose short-term goals and unchecked greed contributed to this mess. News that the governor and Legislature were still working madly to pass a casino bill—think they’d put a fraction of such effort into the issue of energy security?—underscored what a useless lot they are.
Political hacks across the state jumped to criticize the power companies; this was grandstanding at its worst. Western Massachusetts Electric Company president Peter Clarke glibly fired back: “I understand the worst thing that can happen to a politician is to have an event like this a week before an election.”
In a dark, cold house, politics seemed even more ridiculous, remote and irrelevant than usual. The feeling didn’t go away when we finally got our power back on Saturday evening, a full week after the storm.
