[the_old_crowd] Northeasterners? Texans?

Sat Aug 16 22:00:56 UTC 2003

Hi, everyone--

Same as Sheryll here (waves to Sheryll, who called her when this first hit).  Hasn't been 100% bad, though--my grandmother has what amounts to a bomb shelter beneath her basement, so we had enough to eat, batteries, candles, water, etc.  I got to her house well before dark and have been there ever since.  And don't grumble around her about any of this... this is exactly how people lived, she says, for all except the past 100 years.  When you have no electricity, sewage, or gasoline, and no A/C in sticky 90 degree weather then... well, you just have what life was like in Florida during the Depression, when she was a little girl.  Wherefore the complaining?

It's been great, quite shockingly.  We've been having neighborhood cookouts (even some of the local grocery stores barbecued their meats and gave away food before it spoiled!) and Thursday night when the city was pitch black, there were fireworks and bonfires (although they're totally illegal in the city) and such.  Neighbors who haven't talked to each other in years sat on porches and chatted and shared... one of our neighbors went Friday morning to get ice and dry ice for the entire block.  I got a chance to spend a lot of time with my baby nephew, as my sister was worn out from the heat and a lack of sleep, so that was good too.  I also learned a lot from my grandmother about how people lived a couple of generations ago... we cooked, cleaned, and even washed clothes without electricity.  I learned how to grill and bake much better than I did, too.

This weekend, people are sleeping outside and in basements under candlelight.  It was actually quite amazing to see *all* the stars, to be listening to the radio and turning meat over an open fire and laughing with family and neighbors, and I'll bet anything that there'll be a LOT of babies born in 9 months' time in this region of the US/Canada.  Hot summer night... nothing else to do... (Grin.)  The only bad thing is that you can't use the water and might not be able to use it w/o boiling until the middle of next week.  They're asking us not to turn on the A/C either, but thankfully tonight and tomorrow it will cool off to the 60s-70s F.

It really brought us together as a city and a metropolitan region.  We were all pretty patient... we knew that in the wide scheme of things, we'd very likely be last to get power back.  After all, we're not NYC or Toronto, not quite as strategically important.  So people just really pulled together and were prepared to last it out the weekend.  We kept hearing no power until Monday on the radio, so we love DTE Energy for buying power from elsewhere and getting almost all of us back on faster.

People were too busy being relieved that this wasn't terrorism to be awful.  No looting, robbery, murders, rioting etc. to speak of.  Our mayor and governor are rather put out w/ CNN and at least one other national news service re: the (stereotypical,) erroneous reports about all the looting, and one of the local anchors is going to write a letter.  There was a citywide curfew in effect, and my cousins on the police force rode by and kept us updated.  Even the thugs weren't taking advantage.

Virtually everyone got power by last night here--ours came on around 9:45 p.m., so that was about 28 hours in the dark.  There are still 5,000 people out, and we are in danger of rolling blackouts, but everyone's basically fine.

This proves to me one thing.

People say that Americans are lazy and spoiled and wouldn't know how to survive without our modern conveniences.  

They are wrong.

Americans underneath the 21st century veneer are hardworking, resourceful, and in most cases only 1-3 generations removed from the rural/traditional lifestyle that people have lived for hundreds, even thousands of years.  We have our laptops and our PDAs, but we also have our canned food and staples, our candles and our matches, our hunting rifles and knives and our survival gear.  (In Michigan, it's around 1... everyone was either born here, came from the South, the Middle East or Eastern Europe in about that pop. order.)  

We can indeed survive without all the many things we've invented.  Sure, normally we are perpetually in a hurry and our culture seems really shallow, but when adversity comes, we are just like people in other nations who like to look down upon us...

We can survive anything that comes our way.  And all politics aside, we are like people everywhere.  Even we lazy Americans are well able to preserve our families, our homes, and our country. 

I'm offline until Monday--just wanted to update folks to let you know we're doing fine here in Michigan.

Magically yours from the Great Lakes state--

--Eb (copying this into her LJ)

Sheryll Townsend <s_ings at ...> wrote:
--- Heidi Tandy <heidit at ...> wrote: > As the
northeasterners recover from the blackout and
> a hurricaine bears 
> down on texas, I'm going off topic to ask those
> affected, 'How ya 
> doin'?'
> 
I was without power for about 18 hours and now am in
the midst of a rolling blackout. Means I have power
now but no guarantees that I'll continue to have it.
About 80% of the city has it's electricity back, but
we're apparently sharing, hence the rolling blackouts.

Sheryll, hot, tired and cranky and not looking forward
to tossing out the entire contents of the fridge

=====
"No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously." - Dave Barry

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