Who's Got The Power?

Well, last night was interesting here in the Northland. I was watching The Maltese Falcon while organizing some files on my laptop and vwoosh.... suddenly all is dark (except the laptop which reverted to battery mode.) I slipped on some boots, grabbed a flashlight and went out to the road. In all directions, darkness.

It wasn't a fuse, so we were powerless to do anything about it, but it set in motion a number thoughts. First, that I am glad it is early spring and not mid-winter where temps can be minus twenty or thirty at night. Second, at what point will the frozen goods in the freezers need to be dealt with?

In 1979 I spent a year in Puerto Rico, where blackouts and brownouts were a weekly routine. Evidently the infrastructure we take for granted here in the U.S. was not yet a reliable part of life elsewhere, something I did not know due to my limited experience with such things.

In fact, there was a lot I didn't know about Puerto Rico, that many Americans probably didn't, though I did know my favorite baseball player, Roberto Clemente of the Pittsburgh Pirates, was from Puerto Rico. I also knew that the country was under U.S. jurisdiction, and not a free state. But I did not know that Puerto Rico had four political parties. Two wanted the country to break free of the U.S. and become independent. One of these wanted a Capitalist democracy and the other a socialist state. There third political party wanted Puerto Rico become the 51st state in the U.S. and the last group wanted to keep the status quo, which was good for those in power and not so good for the fifty percent who were unemployed.

It was this last group which held the power, and so it is that Puerto Rico remained a "subject" of the U.S. Actually, people born in Puerto Rico are considered U.S. citizens who can vote.

My thoughts flew to Puerto Rico because whenever the power went out, the refrigerators and freezers had to be left closed. After eight hours they would be opened and we'd all eat the semi-melted ice cream, and cook the meat. The younger people all liked the ice cream part and when five or six hours had passed, they were very attentive to the passage of time.

Last night here, we weren't sure how long the power woulf be off. About a half hour after going to bed all the lights came back on, and the radio. Up we jumped, to take care of everything needing attention.

This morning I went online to find a news story about it, but am not seeing anything. A falling telephone pole snapped some lines and put out the power in a section of Salt Lake. The city of Niles had a brief power outage yesterday, as did the Whittier Middle School on Monday, which sent kids home early. There were also power outages due to winds in Monterrey County, CA, and a pickup us truck that hit a pole somewhere else.

We take it for granted, our roads and electricity and cell phones. Our infrastructure, however, didn't appear out of nowhere. Last night we had candles and a lamp to light the house. This is how it had been done for centuries until Edison came along. In the grand scheme of things, our modern era has been but a blip on the most recent page of history. Where it will end up is anyone's guess, but for now, I like it when they keep the power on.