Chiclone

I lie awake at 3 AM while twelve hundred miles of severe weather moving east at eighty miles an hour passes through my small city. In the Midwest it spawned 24 tornadoes and created waves 27 feet high on the Great Lakes – a storm bigger than the one that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald. Time passes slowly when you can’t sleep. I listen to rain on the roof and watch flashes of light on my bedroom walls, and I count the seconds to the rumble of distant thunder. The thunderstorms are two or three miles away.

Thud. The electricity goes off. Normally, my front porch light casts a dim glow down the hallway to my bedroom, and suddenly that dim glow is gone. I roll over and look at the clock radio; it’s dark, too. The house was quiet before with only the refrigerator running, but now it’s utterly silent. I reach for my mobile phone and punch it on. It has bars; the time is 4:55 AM.

For a long while I lie awake. Finally I get up and go to the living room and light a couple of candles. I dig out my little Walkman-style radio I never use anymore and I sit in my recliner and listen to music. By now it’s 5:55 AM.

I flip open my phone and click onto the Internet. The Weather Channel reports it is 73°F in my central Virginia city at 6 AM this last week of October. (By noon it will be 84° with a heat index of 89°. By 3 PM it will be 86° with a heat index of 92°.) And my county is under a tornado watch.

Though my street is dark, a street lamp operating on a nearby street casts enough light my way to reveal many leaves littering the street. So there has been wind. Sometimes the power goes off and stays off for days. I recall the time I entered a grocery store and found all the fruits and vegetables gone, all the coolers and freezers empty, and the odor of spoiled food in the air … and I recall the way I felt knowing every grocery store in the city was like this one. This outage doesn’t have that kind of feel: that nearby street lamp is one clue power will be on soon. Still, I don’t open the refrigerator door. Power may be restored in two hours or four hours or six. Until electricity is back on, there’s no TV, no computer, no Internet, no cooking, no snacking from the fridge. There’s only FM radio.

After two hours the lights suddenly come on, digital clocks start flashing, the computer starts booting, the refrigerator starts humming. God bless those power company linemen.