We were just sitting there Friday night, the wind whipping through the tree out the window and rain playing battleship against the window and then the power goes out. Bess was in the bathroom and she said she heard a pop. Then Darkness.
Ahh, some candles, and a little
fire, no problem. It’ll come on soon. The rain was pretty bad though. It’s
almost bedtime, it’s around 10:30 pm. I realized after about a half an hour uh oh
Our guest house which is lower
than the regular house, has a French drain (which is a big rectangular hole) with
a pump that collects the water and then shoots it out away from the house. To
avoid the water flooding just directly into the house. So in rain when you hear
that pump shooting the water every few minutes with the thump of a paint ball
gun, you know you won’t be hefting tons of towels into a wet soggy guest house
to clean up the massive water surge, so the pump sound is good.
It took me a half hour of quiet
powerless bliss before I though uh oh.
The pump is plugged in and the plugs don’t work now. And the rain, she is
pouring like a generous gramma with a grand canyon size jug of syrup on a stack
of rocky mountain high pancakes.
Uh Barry, I say. The pump has not
been on for a half an hour.
From now on, the part of fucked
will be played by us.
We scramble out the back door,
how bad could it be, and there is water a few inches above the bottom of her
door. Meaning much water already slid
with its water friends right under the door. I texted our tenant. Um. You might
have a flood.
Did I mention it was 11 pm. I
actually figured out about the pump even earlier than half an hour, I just did
NOT want to get up and deal with it. Because my elbows are shredded from
lifting my mom they are screaming everytime I brush my hair or lift a toothpick.
So there B and I are, with a
bathroom trash can and a horse feed bucket, bailing buckets of water and
throwing them far down the driveway so they don’t just feed back into the lake
by the door.
It’s pounding rain, and B normally
doesn’t get up much except to get a salad or go to a basketball game so I
suddenly thought as he is bailing water and carrying heavy buckets that dammit
why didn’t I finish that eulogy for him. I text Nathan who is out with Brie
doing Door Dash cause it pays really well delivering in the rain and I say we’re in trouble dude
It’s midnight now and we haven’t
reached the bottom of the lake. I gave our tenant about 50 thousand old towels
which I saved TEN YEARS FOR THIS MOMENT and she worked on the inside sopping up
the Rio Grande in there while we bailed on the outside.
Nathan rushes back like Batman to
pick me up and a shovel so we can go fill sandbags at the fire station but then
he can’t get in the neighborhood because the neighbor’s HOUSE IS ON FIRE. So
he’s a block away watching someone’s life go up in flames for an hour while we
try to dam the river with our tears.
All I know next is that Nathan
and I are filling sandbags at the fire station in the rain at 3:30 am. Next to
some other dudes. Sandbags are the corpses of your enemies. Even in death,
their weight is still all on you and you have to use someone’s help to get them
into the trunk. Nathan does all that lifting. All of it.
We get back to the house where
water is still thronging to the guest house like it’s late for an Oscar party and we
dam that fucker in three places. Then we sit there for an hour as the water slowly
builds up and we bail it and then watch it fill again.
I go to bed from 4 to 6.
B from this morning on, and
Nathan, and I, never stop. We are pioneers just trying to keep the house from
flooding, people from freezing and dementia mom from dying. We live in LOS
ANGELES. Modern life is out the window.
Our meth neighbor has firewood he’s chopped up for years during his manic meth
binges and the wood is piled from his yard to the international space station.
We catch him out there by chance and he says take all you want. He’s not really
going to space much anymore.
Nathan and B pile the wood and
then Aela who came to visit the powerless, and Brie and Bess and I make a log
line and ferry the logs from cart to front door to fireplace. B runs to get a
generator. More rain is coming and we can’t bail again.
The Department of Water and Failure
keeps telling us that the power will be on again at 4. And then 6. And then
tomorrow. And then the next day.
Emma comes home from Santa
Barbara to see her old roommates from London and go to the Academy Award museum
and two of the friends who have driven from Berkeley get about one minute from the
museum in the rain and they hit a pothole and pop two tires. So her museum meeting
with her friends is standing in the street in the rain waiting for a tow truck
for hours and then eating pizza in a hotel room.
It is nice, in the middle of
this, at sporadic moments, to be sitting in the freezing dark next to the only
warm spot, the fire, with your family, in the middle of a city where almost everyone
else has power restored and here you are lighting candles and sticking them
into Martinelli bottles and that’s your actual light for 5 days. The family part, even in brain hurting
emergencies, is still the best part.
The generator says it will work
for 8 hours on two gallons of gas which is true if you don’t turn it on or plug
anything into it and use it. I think it can even work longer than that. To run
the pump that keeps the flood away, you have to refill the fucker every 2 hours
ish. Then we add one heater to the plug and we might as well all drink the
gasoline and light ourselves on fire.
Every time we go outside and come
back in we have to peel off sopping clothes and leave a wet pile. Nathan runs
out of shoes, and pants and sweats. We have a pile of wet towels from the guest
house flood on the porch in a mound large enough to house several eskimo
families.
By the third night, we realize we
will never have power again. I have cleaned out the wet and leaking fridge, so
we are not burdened with food, or the need to eat it. I realize that without tv
you don’t get hungry. You’re too busy getting wood, watching the weather,
pouring gas in the generator, keeping mom dryfedwarm, mucking the barn. You are
in emergency power mode and you can’t relax.
By the third night we slept mom
on her wheelchair tipped into corpse mode (it looked like we were about to
throw her body to sea) because we couldn’t get the electric bed in her room
back into the flattened shape it needed to be in without running a cable out
there in the freezing and it was too cold and I couldn’t run any other cable or
do any other thing that required me to do it.
By last night, we were in a
laundromat with the eskimo towel igloo washing everything. Nathan had stopped
talking because why talk anymore. But also he realized in the midst of this
hell weekend that he never wanted to work as a therapist in his life and now
here he is in grad school for counseling. His feeling of failure to himself is
bigger than any late night generator gas fillage.
That night we run a cable to my
mom’s and put her in her bed and put a heater on in there from the generator.
The kids sleep in front of the fire and when the rain stops they are too
depressed to unplug the pump and put the plug in a heater so they can have a
heater on them. They’ve pretty much decided we are always going to live like
this. Less is more.
It’s no fun being a pioneer it’s
all about warm and disaster. I like when it’s about tv and disappointment.
Pioneers could not do anything
else but survive. Of COURSE they shot rabbits and whatever else came along. Not
only cause they were starving, but because their rifles were too long to turn
around and aim at themselves.
At 7 am, Johnny Washer comes in
to wash mom in the chilly room, and I get up to feed barn, and the Bess for
school. When I go to get hay, there are guys working on the power line. THERE
ARE GUYS THERE. It’s TUESDAY. Day 4.
I don’t believe anything will happen.
It’s been too long. I sit down to write this last letter to my former self.
I miss you, little lamp that used
to turn on. I miss you tv friends on old Seinfelds that I used to listen to
while I sat with my mom and needlepointed. I miss the noise of life that
usually drives me nuts, that I always try to mute or escape. I didn’t know
these things were my soundtrack and that without them who am I. What am I fighting for. I think I knew I
was alive because things were beeping and people were on commercials about new
drugs with so many side effects and heat would click on without me even
standing up. All this noise was the pain in the ass of my life and instead no
it was the river and I was on a happy boat sifting through what to listen to and
what to ignore. I was GOOD, I knew this
river. I could navigate the modern world just like you, because we were born into it
and we rolled along with it, as it changed, like we’re here to do. Look at all of us! We were doing so great! I didn't need to be out of it! I liked
myself. And now look at this tattered pirate ship we’ve become, raising a black flag of moldy laundry, this new version of me is hardened, bitter, cynical,
this is prison me. There’s no turning back.
Hey the lights came on.
