From the coalface

This is what I wrote last night. Then I turned off the laptop, with its modicum of remaining battery life, blew out the candle, and was about to go to bed when the lights came back on. There was much rejoicing and also some logging into Facebook.

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I write to you by candlelight, such is my dedication to blogging. Candlelight and the light of my laptop, that is, which has 46% of its power left, so I’d better get on with it.

Hurricane Irene swept through last night, starting with gentle rain around midday and working up to a full-blown (heh) tropical storm by midnight. Our power went out at 6.30pm, and came back around two hours later, leaving us congratulating ourselves on our easy storm experience. I’d bowed to Facebook peer pressure and decided to put us all to bed on the family-room floor, rather than upstairs where a falling tree might come through the roof onto isolated individuals. That left me looking at Monkey, asleep directly under a large ceiling fan, and wondering what would happen if the tree crashed through the roof right here or a projectile hurtled through the window beside him instead. But there just wasn’t room for us in the basement, what with all the crap we have taking up vital floorspace down there.

Anyway, the kids thought it was a great adventure to bring down the mattresses, and they – amazingly – went to sleep quite quickly before the daylight had entirely gone. Leaving B and me to happily update our profiles and drink coffee when the power came back on.

Several hours later I was busy obsessing over the ceiling fan while lying on the spare-room mattress a few yards along and waiting for Mabel - who occupied the spot in between - to wake up. I had set my phone to receive severe-weather updates for our area from The Weather Channel because the other thing I was obsessing about was tornadoes, and I wanted to know if there was a tornado watch, even though then I’d have to decide whether it was worth waking everyone to move them downstairs to the basement where there was no room, just because conditions were favourable to a tornado, or whether I would wait for an actual tornado warning, when a funnel cloud had been already sighted, before making that upheaval. Thus taking the risk that swirling our house into the firmament would be exactly where it was first sighted.

I made sure my phone was on vibrate. Then I spent the next five hours or so checking my phone every time it vibrated to tell me that there was a flood watch, a flash flood warning, or a tropical storm going on, but never a tornado. I’m happy about that – don’t get me wrong – but I wish there had been a Tornado Only setting. Then I might have got more than four hours sleep before the kids woke at their usual time of 6am, by which time the electricity had been out for about two hours.

It’s 9.30pm and it hasn’t come back yet.

Apart from that we had no damage. There were a lot of leaves on the lawn this morning, and a tree fell sideways from two houses down into the back garden of our next-door neighbour, but apart from the power, everything’s dandy.

It was funny how, once we lost electricity, it seemed surprising that even the tiniest thing could actually be accomplished. I was a little amazed this morning to find I could, in fact, brush my teeth. It was also (sadly) perfectly possible to sweep the bathroom floor and clean the shower without electricity. But mostly, B and I both got stuck into good books to replace our usual web-surfing habits for the day. This was bad for our parenting, because it made us both even more prone than usual to wait for the other one to address the screaming/yelling/pumelling/indoor bike-riding that may have been going on, rather than just doing it ourselves.

Anyway. The problem now is that we find ourselves totally unprepared for a long-drawn-out power cut. B went to Target for batteries, it’s true, but it was only when the light was dying that it turned out we didn’t know where any of the flashlights/torches were. We’re now – right now, I mean - operating with two bike lights and a tiny ornamental lantern that I’ve had for about ten years and never used before.

This is because, I have decided, Irish people – please allow me to generalise wildly here – don’t go camping. The weather’s too bad in Ireland, and there’s a lack of wilderness to get out into because the country’s just too small for that sort of thing. So while here in the US camping is a perfectly acceptable hobby, something people can take off and do for a weekend at the drop of a tent pole, Irish people mostly limit themselves to Posh Camping in France. This is the sort of camping where you just drive there, and then wheel your suitcases into a fully equipped, already erected, family-size tent, caravan (trailer), or mobile home on a campsite near the beach and mostly populated by other Irish families and nice Dutch people with perfect English. You have a selection of on-campsite and local restaurants, a little shop that sells baguettes and sunscreen a short walk away, and lots of cheap wine to bring home and see you through the Irish winter. It’s not what you’d call hardship camping. The most difficult part will be when you have to lift up your suitcase because the weels got stuck in the grass.

I did, once, spend two nights in a tiny two-person tent in Yosemite with my best friend. I spent most of the time wide awake worrying about bears. Have you read Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods? Where he sits up all night armed with a toenail clippers to defend himself from marauding bears on the Appalachain Trail? It was like that, except I didn’t even have the toenail clippers. But even then, we didn’t need stuff, because we were in a campsite with a pizza restaurant, and we were 20, and it was only for a weekend.

So by the time you read this I’ll presumably have power again and all this unmitigated darkness and lack of Internet connection will be but a hazy memory. I just hope I remember it for long enough to go to REI and invest in some sort of camping lantern for the next time.