This April a freak snowstorm passed through upstate New York and dumped two feet of heavy wet snow on the softened-from-spring evergreens surrounding the lake. Cody woke up early, as he always does, to start the coffee maker. "There's no power," I heard yelled up to the loft.
"Great." is how I probably replied. My first thought was work, my mind racing about how to contact them. You can't work remotely with no power or Internet. And you can't just disappear. What will they think? (To make matters worse, I had just started a new job.)
"I'll go up to the road and see how things look," said Cody. "Then we can go up and get a text out." The cabin — and most of the lake — lacks cell service but you can usually get a bar or two a few hundred feet up the road.
Best laid plans, as they say. Conditions ended up being worse than expected; what we thought was the sound of a plow rolling around the lake was actually the din of tree branches snapping under the weight of the snow. Branches and trees fell every few minutes all around us; no path felt safe to traverse. Despite all this, we were both singularly focused on finding a way to call out of work. (Old workaholic habits die hard.) Briefly we considered taking a canoe out onto the lake, where one bar of cell service is usually possible. As we stood by the water considering this plan, a 30 foot pine crashed into the lake nearby. We gave up and went inside.
We rationed the phone batteries as we tried to think of a way to communicate with the greater world. Eventually, we discovered a spot in the bathroom of the upstairs loft — the top ledge of a double hung window, specifically — that would get intermittent cell service throughout the day. We staged texts to our parents, and to work, and left the phones in that spot, waiting for a strong enough signal to carry them away.
It felt like relying on a carrier pigeon, but eventually we got details on the storm and the overall condition of the area. The electric company said they were aware of the issue (most of the county was out) and declared power would be restored to our address by 11PM. We dragged some logs in from the shed, started up the woodstove, and threw some frozen waffles on the top in a cast iron pan. At this point I wasn't overly concerned. We had bottled water, ground coffee, and would keep the fridge and freezer shut all day. An annoyance, but manageable.
The evening came and went with no repair trucks in sight. The next morning we again woke up to no power. We used several laptops to charge our phones. At this point the fridge was warm, so we ate bread and peanut butter and apples. I kicked myself for not moving things like milk out into the snow earlier, but at the time it seemed wise to keep the fridge closed if the power was going to come back soon.
The next day, still no power.
This went on for a somewhat unbelievable five days, with a fresh promise from the electric company every morning to restore power by evening. Each day no trucks arrived. Desperate phone calls (usually delivered by proxy from relatives with better cell service) went ignored. At some point someone came and moved the downed wires and some branches, right around when we exhausted our phone battery packs. That gave us the ability to go out for groceries and bottled water, and to charge our phones in the car.
It did not, however, bring the ability to bathe, deal with dirty dishes easily, or keep food cold. I put some snow in zip lock bags to keep in a cooler outside, as a kind of makeshift fridge. Juice boxes and bottled drinks were a much appreciated treat — I kept those out in a pile of snow in the woods, so we'd have something cold to drink.
Frustration mounted each day. Warm weather arrived to melt the snow, which improved our moods but ended the pleasure of outdoor-stored cheese. I think we both knew it was time to consider alternatives by the end of the fourth day when there were still no repair trucks in sight. On the afternoon of the fifth day some trucks with technicians arrived. In a few hours we had power restored.
The first hot shower was glorious.
After the fact, friends asked how we managed to do this for five full days. The answer is with a lot of continuous effort. Spring is a difficult season for a power outage because it's not cold enough to run the woodstove constantly, which would've provided an easy way to boil water or heat food, but it's also not warm enough to go without heat entirely. If it were February I probably would've made naan or tortillas in a cast iron pan on the top of the constantly-running stove. Instead we burned a single fire each day, early in the morning, to take the chill out of the house and heat something for breakfast. That one warm meal really made the difference; cold food may keep you alive but it doesn't keep you going.
The days felt long. The short wave radio kept us entertained until the battery died, after which we played scrabble by battery light. We went to bed when it got too dark to play, and spent most of our time managing the mundane: filling the toilets with water from the creek, planning what food to eat and in what order, monitoring the battery charge on the phones. The hardest period was midway through the week, when I pulled a muscle in my dominant arm. It was a particularly bad strain with painful spasms that radiated from my shoulder all the way down to my fingers. I hobbled around using my left hand to pour water and make coffee, but I couldn't help haul wood for the stove or do any of the more intensive daily life tasks. Recovery took days longer than usual without creature comforts like lying in front of the television with a hot water bottle easily refreshed from the sink.
In short, it was hard.
Even so, I'm grateful for the practical things we learned from this experience: the usefulness of refrigeration-and-cooking-free foods like peanut butter, the value of electricity free hobbies, the importance of a cell phone battery for communication (this one we knew, but our solar powered chargers were still packed in a storage unit over an hour away, under who knows how much junk — another bit of life debt from moving so quickly). And those are certainly important things. But I've also found myself thinking more deeply about the meaning of this experience given our present lives.
Unlike many people — perhaps most? —we are still living a "pandemic life," meaning: only seeing each other and (rarely) individual friends or family. It also means not going to weddings, parties or restaurants; and having to rely on a patchwork of mail order and curbside services for all the “stuff” daily life requires. There are personal reasons for this, but it doesn't need to be justified beyond the simple fact that some people still do not want to get COVID. And with this approach we have remained COVID-free, even in wave after wave.
I can't say many share my perspective at this point. I once joked that assembling a group of my friends in a room would be an easy way to represent all possible viewpoints on all possible things. That's probably the case here too, and I accept it. After all, my own thoughts on a myriad of things have changed, and continue to change, throughout my life. It doesn’t change my perspective on this, though. I still don't want to get COVID.
And so people ask us, incredulously, how we continue to live life this way. I think in their minds it is probably equivalent to living without electricity, but to me it isn’t comparable in any way. The larger world may be challenging, but on the micro level, my daily life is… comfortable. I see and talk to people regularly, work remotely, and enjoy all the conveniences of modern life (indoor plumbing being at the top of the list). I sit in the sun of our back yard, watching my chickens roam. I live in a beautiful place.
Like anyone, I still miss things about so-called normal life. But when I long for bars, restaurants, and weddings, it is more out of a desire for the carefree innocence of life before 2020. It's that world I miss, not the things in it.
This lifestyle does require planning — there's no popping by a store on the way home to grab milk when you're out or running into a café between errands (replace that with meticulous research and phone calls to confirm curbside services). Do I miss spontaneity? Sometimes. But for many years I lived with constant spontaneity; we worked a lot and drove a lot. We made multiple grocery store visits a week. Weekends were more often than not spent on errands, hustling from place to place to catch up on chores we were too busy to do during the week. Things changed for us dramatically when we moved to our original farm house in 2020, at the height of the pandemic. We took the virus seriously and avoided people and places. When setting up our hobby farm, we had to order things and wait for them, and steer our plans to what was possible at the moment. We couldn't build the chicken run until the deck screws arrived. We couldn't prepare the field until the tiller arrived. We planned our timelines weeks out, instead of impulsively starting a project when the mood struck. We became more patient, and more organized.
I realize now how much more free time we have after a year spent conditioning our logistics muscles. We drive much less, and our weekends feel twice as long. Sometimes I wonder if having more time to think — because the pandemic blunted the constant motion in our lives — was what drove my decision to reconsider having a child. I don't know what would've happened if things had continued on as they had, if I didn't have to navigate such dramatic changes. Something to be grateful for, perhaps.
So I sit here on the first true hot day of spring — what feels like a summer day — and consider all the things that I appreciate about our life. Not just the running water, refrigeration, and light-on-a-switch — but the larger things. Feeling safe. Having a home to live in. Our health. I think of my ancestors, how different my life is from theirs. My husband is not fighting a war overseas. We are not fleeing persecution. We aren't alone or isolated — modern technology gives me a way to work, to talk to people, to see my friends and family. I find myself writing long letters again, like I used to when I was a teenager.
My life may not always be easy presently, but it is comfortable, and safe. And for now, that is enough.