It Was a Dark and Stormy Night—Really

I know what you’re thinking: it is often both dark and stormy at night, and you are quite correct. In fact, this is especially true in the winter, but last night I got an extra dose of dark: by the time the sun set, I’d been without power for several hours, and in my neighborhood, dark is dark.

We have no streetlights, and when there’s a blanket of clouds over everything and the power goes out, it’s the kind of blackness in which you really cannot see your hand in front of your face.

I write this on my backup PDA using a portable keyboard. I am conserving all of my laptop power as well as the power on my primary PDA (which is also my cell phone) for fear this loss of power will last a few days.

It’s now almost nine o’clock, so the outage is nearing hour eighteen.

Other than it being cold in the house—it’s dropped to 52 degrees—the outage has been an adventure.

I have plenty of candles, a gas stove, and a gas water heater, so I can have hot food and beverages, and later today, I can even take a hot shower. (Watch the hair, though, no blow dryer!)

I spent several hours last night reading and writing by candle light, and unless this outage continues through the weekend and a significant snowstorm, I’ll count this as an enjoyable respite from modern life.

During those thrilling days of yesteryear, when I was an undergraduate, I began to marvel at the means by which people who lived in the periods before me had “managed.” Because I was an English major, much of my wonder came from the hours I spent reading novels and writing papers about them: the time it took to do those things often took me into the wee hours of the morning, and things like electricity and technology got me though.

I often thought about the writers whose works I held in my hands: writers who didn’t have the luxury of electric typewriters and heaters and light switches.

It made me really appreciate the effort it took to put words on pages: working by hand and by candlelight without the luxury of the things I took for granted.

I have students who have never used a typewriter, so they have no concept of just how “easy” they have it with computers and the internet at their fingertips.

I was fortunate enough to move from hand-written essays to typed essays to word-processed essays, so not only did I learn how to draft and rewrite and edit, but also I appreciate the technology I have today in a manner most younger people probably do not.

I am extraordinarily thankful for the Internet, and the technology that makes my writing life easier, but I wouldn’t trade having grown up in a time during which the following things were the “technological” standards:

• It took physical effort to change a television’s channels.
• There were days of the week and times of the day gas and groceries and money from one’s bank account could not be acquired.
• Learning something required talking to another human being or going to a library.
• Libraries cataloged their holdings on little cards arranged alphabetically and stored in drawers.
• It took ingenuity to communicate: in our family, that meant “give us two rings when you get home.” (The long distance charge was circumvented, but the message was received loudly and clearly.)
• Typing was a rhythmic adventure that included tapping, dinging, and sliding sounds.

Of course, for the time being, I am enjoying the old-world feel of my day, and I am looking lovingly at several of my bookshelves really appreciating what writers before me managed to accomplish.

~ by Shawn Hansen on January 5, 2008.