Power Outage

“No one knows how to shelter in place like we do”.

Harris County Judge, Lina Hidalgo

There are decisions to make. You wake up at 5:00 because you heard or felt a little click; it has disturbed your dreams, where you have met your friends, unmasked. As expected, your electricity—as, they say, your power—is off. Last night you remembered to charge all the things that may help keep you informed about what is going on outside your house, and what might happen in it. You knew you would lose power, because you always do; it is the first, and on good days the only, sign of disaster. Because you live in Houston, you do not know where your wool socks, bought long ago when you lived in the Northeast, are hidden. The box marked “winter clothes” is almost empty. At the bottom you find one green woolen glove. Thankfully, there is another box marked “Hiking” with two pairs of socks in it and a map of Dartmoor.

After you have put on all the warm clothes you own, you have another job ahead of you. This one involves calculation: should you stay or should you go? This is a familiar question whose shape stays the same through rainstorms, hurricanes, pandemics, or now a “historic cold snap.” You feel you have the tools to make a rational decision: there is the Centerpoint Energy Power Outage App that you can access with your 100% powered phone and the thermostat in your house that registers both the interior and exterior temperature. You are disappointed to find that the Power Outage app is, well, out. You will not be able to look on the map to see the yellow triangles and the orange ones, to identify clusters of people in a similar position, to look for approximate times of power restoration. Your thermostat says 57 degrees, which is cold, but you think not unbearable if you stay in bed under the down comforter you keep at the very top of your linen closet. Live streaming the tv news on your phone is funky and uses a lot of power: the newscasters have a lot of hints for people without electricity, but seem oblivious to the fact that many people without power will not be able to hear or see them. The women, especially the meteorologists, wear summer dresses, pantyhose, and pumps. Many of the hints they offer are negative: don’t use the oven to heat the house; don’t charge your phone in a car inside your garage; be careful with space heaters. Some have a more positive spin: bring your pets inside, check on seniors, wear layers, open the blinds during the day and close them at night. This last one makes it sound like it will be a long haul.

You want to make the best decision possible, but lack a helpful algorithm. As the house gets colder, at what temperature would it make sense to leave for a friend’s house, for your office, for a hotel, for a “warming station?” 60 degrees? 52? 48? The decision is complicated by the fact that there is ice on the roads and Judge Lina Hidalgo has told you to stay at home. It is also complicated by COVID, about which you have almost forgotten in the last hour in bed. Your Facebook feed is full of stories of friends who have booked a hotel room and hazarded icy roads only to find that there is no room ready for them. One of your friends turned around and went home when she was told to wait for an indeterminate time in a hotel lobby full of potentially infectious strangers, also waiting for rooms to be “hygienically cleaned.” Perhaps you find a friend within walking distance who has power, maybe with a generator that groans and belches and makes up its own mind what to heat and what to leave unheated. Perhaps you go to your office carrying air mattresses and camping gear. Perhaps you wait outside in the cold for six hours to get into the warming center that takes pets—but only in a separate section. Perhaps you leave your pet behind in your house with a small pile of rags and blankets stuffed into a box to make a bed as you save yourself and wonder if it is true that cats and dogs can endure far lower temperatures than humans can. “They have fur,” you say to yourself for comfort.

When the temperature goes down below 50, you defy Lina Hidalgo and go stay with a friend, hoping that the “rolling blackouts” won’t follow you there. There will at least be more people, and your friend has dogs who could be used as blankets if they are in an accommodating mood. She does not keep her dogs in a separate place, and you are of two minds about this. You bring food with you as if you were attending a party, but no flowers. Defying Lina—if you might be permitted the intimacy of her first name—does not feel good. She is one of your favorite people, if you don’t count the people you know. She has told you to stay home before and mostly you have listened. You defend her from racist, sexist, and ageist insults on Twitter until the comments become so violent you can no longer respond to or even read them. 

 Although you have not obeyed her, and have walked to your friend’s house perhaps on invisible “black ice,” you share with Lina a profound distrust of the state of things in Texas. You learn, once you are able to connect to your friend’s wifi, that Texas has refused to join the other two multi-state power grids that cover the rest of the US. You are quite sure that part of the problem is that the state government still thinks we are—or should be—living in the Republic of Texas with its own laws, its own rules, ever on the edge of secession. There is, you admit to yourself even as you think how much you hate the Texas State legislature once so blue and now so deep and bloody a red, a larger issue. While you do not know what the technical term for the problem might be, you know it has something to do with a newly virtual form of capitalism, where inventory, even of something as abstract as power is something to be scorned and avoided. Supermarkets have stopped storing extra produce “in the back”; the nation stopped keeping stores of PPE. Buying extra “wattage” might weigh a good republic down. The fantasy is that everything can be quickly produced and distributed—except when it can’t because there are no factories, and, besides, the roads are icy and even Amazon is not delivering.

On the second day you return with your friend to your home, but just to check and see that your pipes are not frozen, and that your shrimp and chicken breasts are. Your friend remembers entering your house on a similar mission after Hurricane Ike blew down an oak tree that crashed through your roof and came to rest in kitchen and bedroom. This time, for a while at least, the news is good. The pipes are still dripping the way you left them, also against Lina’s advice. The shrimp and chicken breasts have not thawed or rotted. This may be because the thermostat in the house registers 32 degrees, temperature from which there is no thawing. You collect some groceries, call your mother, and leave your house again.