Ticket 2 Ride

I started writing this blog last week. Today, we were awoken by the sound of a neighbor’s generator. Yep, the power is off…

As I sit here, beverage in hand, the sky is full of black lines and wooden poles. A squirrel’s paradise.

Each storm that rolls through has the potential to knock out our power. Living in an area with overhead power lines makes us more vulnerable to going offline. Even if we had buried power lines, storms or other factors would take out a transformer or other device upstream. It’s a reality of the power grid.

Losing electricity has all kinds of implications, from inconvenience to life-threatening. More than a couple of hours in the dark makes my head spin, although no one can see it. Our daily lives are centered around electricity and I cannot imagine living somewhere the power grid is disrupted as a result of catastrophic system failure or war.

Some people prefer living off the grid, disconnected from more than the power grid. Not me, I need to be online with the outside world. More than one person has remarked to me, “You are always on your phone!” While I usually disagree with those comments, I do have a lot of screen time during a day. I’ll admit that.

I used to be plugged into having the TV or stereo on, I guess for background sound or to keep me company. I no longer need that; I can now sleep with it, although my wife sleeps with a fan on. White noise is a popular sleep aid. I do love having music on when I’m reading, but don’t require it. I am a satellite radio subscriber and that’s always on in the car – not talk or podcasts – just music, baby!

So, back to being online. I use my phone to write these blogs; I spend hours each day (yes, really) reading, researching, watching videos, listening to music, and composing blogs. The internet is a lifeline for me to the outside world. It’s where I get news, connect with friends, make purchases, pay bills, play word games, and on rare occasion, even talk on the phone.

If the power line goes down, thankfully I keep my phone charged (and have a backup battery), so I’m good, for a while. During those times, like water in the desert, I need to ration my battery power.

What about before the internet? We used transistor radios and our landlines. The world was a different size then; our worlds were very small, neighborhoods and towns. Satellites, fiber optic communications cables, wireless and other inventions brought the world into our homes (or anyplace we go); essentially to our fingertips.

In the 1965, the entire New York City area was in the dark for eight hours. The City was part of a power failure that started in Ontario and impact 30M people along the Northeast. Other, later blackouts, would be violent and riotous, but the 1965 event has been described as almost neighborly, as hundreds of thousands of people were stranded in elevators, subways, elevated trams and other places of major inconvenient. Today, it takes very little to cause a meltdown in society, forget neighborly. There was even a film comedy about this event: Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?

During the winter of 2021, my local electrical utility initiated “controlled interruptions of service” due to the power grid having exhausted available energy reserves. An intense cold snap triggered record breaking demand, and “threatened widespread uncontrolled outages.”

I can tell you, it didn’t take long for the house to get very cold during the 60-90 minute outages. I’m not sure about the neighborly attitudes being shared, or the spike in births, nine months later.

Power grids are interesting things. I never think about the management of electricity or how it flows regionally. I just leave it to others and hope the power comes on when I flip the switch. There is a commission that oversees the generation and distribution of electricity in my state. I actually used to work for this agency, although I was not in public utilities, I worked in regulating oil and gas production. Oil and gas companies hold a lot of power in my state.

There’s a 1970s political-thriller film, Three Days of the Condor, about the corrosive secrecy of intelligence agencies and their plans to keep the energy resources flowing to American consumers. At the end of the film, a top-level CIA official justifies the secret work of his people by saying that Americans won’t care what the government will do to keep their homes warm and machines running. Righteous talk won’t matter, turning the lights on will.

As we sit in bed, waiting for the power to be restored, I’m glad that it appears to be a minor outage. A cat and dog are in bed with us, life has all kinds of annoyances, at times like this, I’m thankful for the life I have, and can bitch about the small stuff. Peace.