07 February 2010
 
Hierarchy of Needs

(The View from Tunnel Eight, 0800 Saturday, 06 February 2010. Photo by Socotra)

The alarm did not go off. I wondered about that in the grayness. A curiosity. I did not know what to make of it, but I am sleeping in the guest bedroom to give Jinny some privacy, and I don't have complete confidence in the clock there. I got up to pee and flipped the switch a couple times, thinking that the light must have burned out.
 
I was on the third cycle (I’m slow) when I realized that the unresponsive switch meant  that the power had died in the night. I padded back into what I will always think of as The Invisible Step-daughter’s room, and stretched out again under the little quilt I bought to stay warm while Jinny was camped out in the master bedroom.
 
No power.
 
Shoot, that means no coffee. My usual regimen of Dazbog Full Bean blend, freshly ground each morning meant that even if I could heat water on the stove, I could not crack the beans to yield the caffeine I would need to get my mind right for the morning. What the morning might contain under a couple feet of snow was another story.
 
We have never lost power in a snow-storm before, though of course there never was a storm quite like this before, either. Not since 1922, according to the little radio.
 
The quilt is not quite wide enough for good solid thinking, and posture must be precise to ensure warmth equitable and well-distributed warmth when there is no central heat. Coffee.
 
A morning without coffee? Not possible. Then the Eureka! Moment.
 
I thought about the French Press device that has been sitting up on top of the cabinets in the kitchen since early in the second Bush first term.
 
I thought it was sort of elegant when I bought it, and with applications for the office, but as usual I didn’t think things through.
 
I don’t now what I was thinking. It makes great coffee, though it requires boiling water, which is in short supply at the Pentagon, and leaves a mass of grounds under the efficient piston that you push down through the hot water and the floating coffee.
 
I spent an hour under the covers contemplating the idea. It might not work for the office, but it certainly would with boiling water from the gas stove. If only I had some pre-ground coffee.
 
In a triumph of forethought, there actually was a bag on Starbuck’s Breakfast blend that was pre-ground and dated “best by” a date in the later part of the second Bush second Administration. That and the little battery radio suddenly connected me to the world. Less than ten more hours of snow, the voices informed me.
 
Of course, I had not bothered to purchase extra batteries to feed.
 
Damn. Maybe there would enough juice to get through a few hours and figure out what was happening to us, and if there would ever be electricity again, the snow getting higher and higher on the flanks of the building until we disappeared into a glacier as solid as he first Gore Administration.
 
I made French press coffee for Jinny when she got up sensibly late since she knew that the power had gone. She wanted to talk, periodically, and I had to take the ear-buds out of my ears to listen to her.
 
So that is how the day began, and then the call from Jiggs.
 
He said that he had cooked chili to feed everyone in case the power stayed off, and his place was warm.  So there was warm food, and there were plans that had to be cancelled, since the snow was still coming down, and Saints be preserved, the power came back before lunch.
 
Which did not include the monopolistic parasites at Comcast, of course, and the television and Internet connection gave me the blank blue screens of nothing.
 
We have evolved as a species, or devolved. Maslow’s famous pyramid of need is not what it was. We had heat; in time, there would be hot water for a decent shower. Food was not an issue. Theoretically, we should have been up near the tip of the pyramid, right above safety and hovering around social needs.


 
Instead, I realized that I have outsourced my memory to the cloud and no longer remember the most common of facts. That includes, but is not limited to, the capacity for research; my banking and finance, taxes, television schedules, favorite shows and general communications of all manner.
 
If the snow keeps coming, I am going to have to learn a whole bunch of survival skills again.
 
There were more cell calls through the morning, and I breathed a sigh of relief that I would be able to keep the phones charged for a while, and not devolve into icy silence.
 
It was really pretty much OK. In the end Jinny and I watched a DVD of  the classic John Huston film “Key Largo.” You will recall that Lauren Bacall and Bogie and Edward G. Robinson are cut off from civilization by hurricane. All manner of mayhem and mischief occurs, and romance, of course.
 
What a great freaking film.
 
I stood out on the balcony when it was done and surveyed the wide wasteland of white.
 
The recovery started the next morning.
 
We dug out Jinny’s rental car, not that there is any place to go, except to try to get to Mac’s building for lunch, but as it turned out we just roared down the two wheel tracks carved into the service drive and into a big drift.
 
Digging out of that mess gave us something to do in the afternoon. When we got back, we discovered that Comcast had finally restored service only 48 hours into the emergency.
 
I suspect it is because if the cable had stayed out through the Super Bowl, the company knew that Congress would have had their butts. I checked the e-mail. The weather-guessers are calling for five or ten more inches of snow early in the week.
 
The entire funeral party is still stuck at the hotel, and the only one who made it home before the snow was Rex.
 
It looks like maybe no one is going anywhere here, not until Spring.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Subscribe to the RSS feed!