Hurricane Damage

There was no running today.  All night, the wind blew and the fine hurricane rain sizzled against the windows.  We were worried about our neighbor making it home last night; she had texted saying that she was delayed in Town and the road was impassable - meanwhile, someone had posted this photo on Facebook of Highway 28:

But first responders were out, as well as ordinary people, men with pickup trucks and chainsaws who delight in clearing these roads.  It is wonderful how everybody pitches in when storms like this strike!  I have done some of that work myself in the past, and it is very satisfying to free up a road or a driveway, to join in the general effort, to do just a little to help the recovery.  Our neighbor, to our great relief, finally rolled into her driveway at dusk, and shortly after that our lights blinked three times and then went out, suddenly and completely, and there was darkness and silence.  I went down to the basement and dragged the generator out and cranked it up, and we had power for awhile, and a comforting gas fire to sit in front of all night.

This morning we realized that our land-line phone was also dead, so even with the generator running we had no cell-phone service either.  So we decided to drive to Clayton to see if we could find more gas for the generator, charge out phones, and check in on friends and family.  The road was littered with down trees and limbs, but a lane had been cleared all the way down to the Warwoman Road, where we finally encountered a sizable tree across the road which looked like it might barely scrape the top of our Honda CRV.  So we turned around and went south on 28 to Walhalla instead.

So this is how my long-suffering wife spent her birthday.  There were some rueful comments made as we headed home on Highway 28, but we were both grateful that the damage overnight had been minimal - just many, many tree limbs down on our property - and that we were well-provisioned.  I cranked up the generator again, and in a little while Martha noticed that our neighbor's light over the garage was on.  Disconnecting the generator and turning on the main breaker, we were rewarded with one of the sweetest sounds imaginable after 24 hours without power:  the simultanelus beeping of clocks, the whooshing of the furnace, the loud humming of the refrigerator.  Power.

It is good to be without, from time to time, and I know and admire those who want to be disconnected from the grid all the time.  But I do enjoy the simple pleasures of life with electricity:  a reading light, a computer, a stove that works, and warm water coming out of the faucet.  Our hearts go out to those in Florida and South Georgia who will not have these things for many more days, and for the many who have lost everything.