Power Outage

On Thursday evening, the winds at the Cedar City airport reached 55 MPH. Sometime during the night, Rocky Mountain Power lost contact with Parowan and we awoke on Friday morning without electricity. I got out of bed in an almost eerie dark silence. I put on my head-lamp and Valerie lit some candles, but it was almost 7a before we could see anything without them. It was a strong reminder of how much we rely on the ambient light from a thousand electronic devices. Normally, when I get up, there is some spill-over light from the street, from the neighbor, from the printer in my office; there is a little blue light from the coffee maker, from the microwave, from the cell phone charger; and on and on. There is no such thing as darkness anymore. Our lives are lighted from a hundred sources that we no longer notice. Likewise, there are sounds that have become part of the background hum of modern life: the motor in the fridge, the small fan cooling the computer hard-drive, and the surge of the heater keeping our water hot. On Friday morning, all of these were absent . . . and the house was quiet . . . quiet and dark . . . like it must have been on a Friday in April a hundred years ago.