The day after the storm, it didn’t seem all that odd to be without cable TV, without phone or Internet service. We felt lucky to have electric power, which many of our neighbors in Franklin County remain without as I write this.
We awoke that first morning to find our usually tidy back yard strewn with debris. The chicken run was collapsed under the top half of a big maple tree, which had snapped just above its lowest branches. (I’d known there might be a problem when the woodpeckers began making regular visits to that particular tree a few years back, but I didn’t do anything about it.) A long, heavy vertical limb of a big black locust tree had splintered 30 feet up and fallen at an angle, still attached at its breaking point, its massive crown on the ground 30 feet from the trunk. The limb had crushed our blow-up swimming pool, which was hemorrhaging its 1,500 gallons of water onto our quickly eroding lawn. Thankfully, the house and garage were largely spared, except for a few big branches that had ripped a section of gutter off the front of the house and another section off the back of the garage.
As I fired up the chain saw, my wife and daughter got breakfast going and listened to the radio for school closings. Ordinarily, the school sends out a robocall to announce a closing, as well as posting the information on its website. But on this day, we needed to turn to a low-tech source of news: terrestrial radio. Used to getting the scoop on demand, my wife and daughter became frustrated when the school closings weren’t immediately broadcast, and announced that they were going to take a drive to check things out. Had they waited another moment by the radio, they’d have heard the list of school cancellations, in addition to a public safety warning encouraging people not to wander around gawking at the fallen trees and downed power lines.
I had no sooner set the ladder against the house and climbed up to reattach the gutter than my cell phone rang. Ah, I thought, sweet civilization. It was my wife, calling with a report. The mayhem in our back yard was nothing compared to the devastation in other parts of town; trees and power lines were down everywhere and many of the secondary roads throughout Whately, Deerfield and Hatfield were closed—news that I’d already learned from the radio. But our local radio station didn’t have the information that was most important to my wife, who runs an online retail business.
“I just ran to Rich,” she reported, referring to one of our friends. “He has sporadic Internet service in Hatfield. I’m going to swing by the library to see if they have their wifi working.”
I reminded her that it wasn’t even eight o’clock. With or without Internet, the library wasn’t open yet.
“Right, right,” she said. I could hear panic in her voice.
By the time I headed off to work on the second morning after the storm, I was trying to be philosophical about our wrecked chicken run, ruined pool and fallen trees. Thankfully, the old maple missed the coop, so my birds were alive and still had a safe shelter at night. And I’d been meaning to start free-ranging them anyway. The pool could probably be patched, and while it would take several weekends to clean up all the downed trees, I figured I’d have at least $300 worth of firewood for my trouble. Betsy was right: we’d gotten off easy.
Part of me was enjoying being largely cut off from the digital world, not being able to access my work email account, not feeling compelled to switch on the cable TV before bed, not surfing the Web with my first cup of coffee in the morning. But hardly an hour went by that I wasn’t reminded, not only of my lack of digital access, but of all of the high-tech gadgets—the iPhone, for example, or even a sturdy flash drive—that would have helped patch around the problem but that I don’t own.
My wife, meanwhile, quickly forgot about the state of the physical world outside our door. Her concerns were entirely virtual, and finding no romance in her forced freedom from the information superhighway, she stewed in her growing anxiety. When I reminded her that she’d lived most of her life without the wonders of digital technology, and that even with an occasional outage, an online retailer is still open more often than a traditional bricks and mortar retailer, she batted away my words of comfort with a comment that spoke volumes about the modern state of mind.
“Yeah,” she said, coolly, “but we haven’t had service in nearly two days.”
