Steve (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} thesportinglife) wrote,@ 2003-08-15 12:16:00 |
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There is a light that never goes out
Yesterday's blackouts in the northeastern United States and Ontario got me thinking about times I've literally been in the dark.
Probably the most memorable was when I was 9 or 10. My friend Dirk and my brother's friend Lane, brothers who went to our church and were in our respective grades at school, were spending the night with us one day during summer vacation. Anyone who grew up in the South and was served by a rural electrical cooperative for power knows that outages, ones lasting for hours or even overnight, aren't out of the ordinary. Thanks to thunderstorms -- most prevalent during the spring and summer but known to pop up any time of the year -- the need for flashlights, extra batteries and candles is always there.
But on this day, no clouds were in sight. It was summer, so the wind certainly wasn't anything above an occasional stir.
So this mystery of what was leaving us without lights and without air conditioning had my mom engaged in the No. 1 pastime for almost every woman living in a town of under 15,000 people: talking on the phone.
Like an eager cub reporter, she managed to get a good lead on the cause. My grandmother's friend Marge, who lived in a neighboring town, had heard on her police scanner that someone had missed the curve and plowed their car into a power pole at Glover Brothers, a cluster of homes, my uncle's two chicken houses and the hardware store and lumber company from which the locality took its unofficial name. (I, for instance, lived near Burnt Church, an intersection where today is standing only a Methodist church -- one that has burned to the ground not once but twice.)
As you could imagine, a car slamming into a utility pole was a huge story to us. Car crashes, fires and crime was so rare in our little outpost of 1,500 or so people that this was headline news as far as we were concerned.
Dirk, Lane, my brother and I -- I don't know how we managed to do it -- somehow convinced my mom to drive to the crash site so we could get a look for ourselves.
We lived only one to two miles from Glover Brothers, so, as soon as we turned off our blacktop road onto the one that led to our Baptist church and our K-12 school, the two most significant institutions of my childhood, we spotted the lights of emergency vehicles.
Cars and pick-ups were everywhere, mostly those of volunteer firefighters and EMTs who had rushed to the scene, parked in driveways, crammed into the dirt lot at the chicken houses and all along the roadside. These people weren't standing around, gawking, either. They scrambled to find something, anything, that they could do to help.
Somebody -- probably Mr. Sharp, who worked at the hardware store and whose daughter Patra was in the same class as Dirk and I -- saw us rubbernecking (one of the few) and ran over to fill us in on the details. It turned out that the driver was unharmed, but power lines had fallen onto the vehicle, which meant the guy had to stay as still as possible until the co-op could turn off the power and make certain it was safe for him to escape the wreckage.
I don't even know whether that's true, but I know that's how my 9-year-old mind interpreted the event, and all I could think about was all the metal objects I would have to avoid touching if I found myself in a similar predicament: the seat-belt latch, the crank handle for the door window, the door handle. I wondered whether I could stay still enough. I can recall, during the following weeks, practicing a time or two on trips to the grocery store or our county seat's Big K department store.
After Mom had given the four boys in her car the chance to soak up the spectacle of police cars, fire trucks and organized chaos for a couple of minutes, she turned the vehicle around and took us back home, where power was restored within a couple of hours.
Where I am today, losing power is a more unsettling situation. I still light candles and still gather flashlights and batteries from around the house, just as I did in rural Alabama and, during my mid 20s, in rural Georgia. But now I live alone in a neighborhood in Atlanta that barely earns the label of "transitional." In the last month, four armed robberies and a house break-in have taken place. And that's during the daytime.
Fortunately, though, here in the city, the utility equipment is better, more back-ups are in place and the number of electrical workers is much greater. That means power outages are much less frequent.
But so is a sense of community, which is what it takes for people from all walks of life to transport someone to safety who's just crashed their car and knocked out the electricity for all his fellow townspeople. And I find myself often wondering whether the trade-offs are worth it.
Yesterday's blackouts in the northeastern United States and Ontario got me thinking about times I've literally been in the dark.
Probably the most memorable was when I was 9 or 10. My friend Dirk and my brother's friend Lane, brothers who went to our church and were in our respective grades at school, were spending the night with us one day during summer vacation. Anyone who grew up in the South and was served by a rural electrical cooperative for power knows that outages, ones lasting for hours or even overnight, aren't out of the ordinary. Thanks to thunderstorms -- most prevalent during the spring and summer but known to pop up any time of the year -- the need for flashlights, extra batteries and candles is always there.
But on this day, no clouds were in sight. It was summer, so the wind certainly wasn't anything above an occasional stir.
So this mystery of what was leaving us without lights and without air conditioning had my mom engaged in the No. 1 pastime for almost every woman living in a town of under 15,000 people: talking on the phone.
Like an eager cub reporter, she managed to get a good lead on the cause. My grandmother's friend Marge, who lived in a neighboring town, had heard on her police scanner that someone had missed the curve and plowed their car into a power pole at Glover Brothers, a cluster of homes, my uncle's two chicken houses and the hardware store and lumber company from which the locality took its unofficial name. (I, for instance, lived near Burnt Church, an intersection where today is standing only a Methodist church -- one that has burned to the ground not once but twice.)
As you could imagine, a car slamming into a utility pole was a huge story to us. Car crashes, fires and crime was so rare in our little outpost of 1,500 or so people that this was headline news as far as we were concerned.
Dirk, Lane, my brother and I -- I don't know how we managed to do it -- somehow convinced my mom to drive to the crash site so we could get a look for ourselves.
We lived only one to two miles from Glover Brothers, so, as soon as we turned off our blacktop road onto the one that led to our Baptist church and our K-12 school, the two most significant institutions of my childhood, we spotted the lights of emergency vehicles.
Cars and pick-ups were everywhere, mostly those of volunteer firefighters and EMTs who had rushed to the scene, parked in driveways, crammed into the dirt lot at the chicken houses and all along the roadside. These people weren't standing around, gawking, either. They scrambled to find something, anything, that they could do to help.
Somebody -- probably Mr. Sharp, who worked at the hardware store and whose daughter Patra was in the same class as Dirk and I -- saw us rubbernecking (one of the few) and ran over to fill us in on the details. It turned out that the driver was unharmed, but power lines had fallen onto the vehicle, which meant the guy had to stay as still as possible until the co-op could turn off the power and make certain it was safe for him to escape the wreckage.
I don't even know whether that's true, but I know that's how my 9-year-old mind interpreted the event, and all I could think about was all the metal objects I would have to avoid touching if I found myself in a similar predicament: the seat-belt latch, the crank handle for the door window, the door handle. I wondered whether I could stay still enough. I can recall, during the following weeks, practicing a time or two on trips to the grocery store or our county seat's Big K department store.
After Mom had given the four boys in her car the chance to soak up the spectacle of police cars, fire trucks and organized chaos for a couple of minutes, she turned the vehicle around and took us back home, where power was restored within a couple of hours.
Where I am today, losing power is a more unsettling situation. I still light candles and still gather flashlights and batteries from around the house, just as I did in rural Alabama and, during my mid 20s, in rural Georgia. But now I live alone in a neighborhood in Atlanta that barely earns the label of "transitional." In the last month, four armed robberies and a house break-in have taken place. And that's during the daytime.
Fortunately, though, here in the city, the utility equipment is better, more back-ups are in place and the number of electrical workers is much greater. That means power outages are much less frequent.
But so is a sense of community, which is what it takes for people from all walks of life to transport someone to safety who's just crashed their car and knocked out the electricity for all his fellow townspeople. And I find myself often wondering whether the trade-offs are worth it.
