I was in the middle of my Spanish class last night when my sister texted me: “Power out. Going to TJ’s. Flashlight is by the door.” The community college class in which I was sitting still had electricity, but that came as no surprise. I live in a rural, cloyingly quaint suburb bordering the more urban town where I go to school, and since our neighborhood runs right up to the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains we’re generally the last ones around to get high-speed internet, cable TV, or whatever the latest wave of technology is. It’s not unusual for us to have a power outage while all my friends in the flatlands have power.
So when I got out of class I was unsure how far the power outage would reach. Outside, garish colors washed over each other indiscriminately to light the world: blinking storefronts, yellowish streetlamps, red taillights. The city was alive. No signs of a power outage here. I got on my bike and started towards home.
I knew I had crossed the border when the streetlights suddenly went out. I felt like I was entering some sort of disaster zone: in front of me, police cars directed traffic and confusion through a darkness that only got deeper the farther I looked. It was eerie, like the lights had gone out over the world. Never before had I felt a power outage so profoundly while outdoors. I realized that though I had often biked through this area at night, I had never truly seen it in darkness. There was always streetlights, the lights of houses, some form of light. Without being able to see my surroundings, I felt like I was swimming through murky water. I knew exactly what was around me, but just the fact that it was there, unseen, seemed surreal.
It got weirder when I biked past our local strip mall. Storefronts that I knew had wide, bright windows and glass doors were pitch black, invisible in the distance. The only thing to show that the place wasn’t a vacant lot was an occasional pair of headlights far off in the parking lot. Never had I been so grateful for the light that my mom had nagged me to install on my bike. I passed by a traffic light that was working – maybe the police had managed to get it on reserve power. It reminded me of a headlamp when you’re camping: a lonely pinpoint, so powerless against the impossibly dark shadows all around that it’s almost eerier than the darkness itself. The asphalt near it gleamed wanly, reflecting the lone traffic light like black water.
As I continued deeper into the affected area I was struck by a sense of comfort. All the features of the landscape that were invisible around me – the ground below, the fence beside me, the fruitlessly immaculate row of trees between the two lanes of the road – it all seemed, or felt, more real than it ever had before. I don’t know why. It was like this was the first time it had ever really faced nature; like it was now an authentic part of the landscape, to stand or crumble as it would without the round-the-clock protection of lamps and street cleaners and busy maintenance workers. I got a feeling of awe, almost holiness, like I was beholding a vision of the earth after Man had driven himself to extinction. In the darkness my mind filled with post-apocalyptic fantasies. This manmade ground, which had never truly felt darkness, was now covered by the same night as the trackless woods and empty plains that were here before time began.
My neighborhood was just as dark and eerily empty. When I got into my house I groped aimlessly in the darkness on the counter by the door, picking up a wrench and a pair of ladies’ underpants before I found the flashlight my mom and sister had left for me. Turning it on and walking through the house, I felt like I was exploring a cave or a crime scene. The first order of business was candles. We don’t have many in our house, since the smoke makes my mom cough. So I improvised. There was an ornate pair of Shabbat candlesticks on our mantel, and I also scared up a random votive candle from my sister’s room. All of these went on our kitchen table, along with another candle stuck (rather resourcefully, I might add) in the top of an empty Chianti bottle.
Once I had lit them the place looked homey enough. The light didn’t spread far, but it was actually bright enough to read my Gov textbook by, so I started on my homework. I was tired. I’ve noticed that whenever I’m without artificial light, my body suddenly reverts to some sort of primeval clock and starts getting tired just after nightfall. When I go camping, I often to go sleep around 9:00, thinking it’s much later. This was no exception. I planned to do my reading, eat something when my mom and sister got back from Trader Joe’s, and go to bed.
The power came back before they did. I hadn’t turned on any lights, so my first indication that something had changed was the neighbor’s porch light blinking on outside the backyard window. But that wasn’t the only indication for long.
Within a few seconds, all the electrical equipment in the house started going haywire. It started with a loud beep from the smoke detector, indicating that it was turning on. Then the VCR started madly rewinding, even though it was empty. I ran to turn it off, but it already was. Pressing the power button caused it to turn on, and the second push silenced it. No sooner had I done that then there was a whumph of static and our big bass speaker let out a deafening, ongoing hum of feedback. I ran to turn off the stereo, but it was off too. Going to the speaker, I desperately turned the bass level down to zero. Finally, the noise stopped. It seemed like everything was under control.
I strolled through the house, listening to the machines that were working again – the soft whirr of the dishwasher, the hum of the refrigerator. It made the house seem comforting and full of life, but also was kind of melancholy. The primeval world of darkness had gone, and nothing was real anymore. My camping trip to the imaginary Wilderness of Suburbia was over. Things were back to normal.
In the dining room, the candles I had lit still flickered. My mom and sister would inevitably want to watch TV when they got home – but that wasn’t to be for a while.
As I sat down to finish my homework, I avoided my instinct to flick the light switch. I knew that this time when I did the light would turn on. But I pretended it wouldn’t, and I sat down to do my Gov reading by candlelight. I didn’t want to blow out the candles. Not quite yet.
the whole benchilada 