Out Loud: Without electricity …

You would think that having lived at 5,000-plus elevation for nearly 40 years and Jack for more than 30, ominous warnings of a major snowfall would prompt us to prepare for the worst.

Well, we spent more time dealing with the business and filling in for sick employees than thinking of ourselves.

We failed to stock up on firewood, and replace flashlight batteries and lamp oil. We failed to arrange for snow plowing in advance.

As a consequence, when power went out for hours at a time and the driveway we share with our neighbor filled with snow, we found ourselves living in a distant past — other than having hot water from our gas water heater and being able to text.  I did have a back-up battery, too, that kept our cell phones powered for a short time.

The rotary-dial phone I recently bought had a broken part so text was the only reliable means of communicating with the outside world.

We found ourselves stranded, too, because Caltrans bermed in the car by the highway while the snow on our driveway buried the other one.

We found ourselves last in line for snowplowing services as everyone with a commercial plow was committed for days.

Was I upset? Not at all.

Before our blessed neighbor, Robin Wood, used his Bobcat to plow, I found enough wood, though wet, to cook lunch and dinner on the woodstove and keep us warm.

The lack of both satellite TV and satellite Internet felt like a blessing.

At night, candles and a large, battery-operated campfire light allowed us to read. Read, I said. We read books — by woodstove and camplight. And we ate omelets and herring cooked in cast-iron. I told Jack it was luxury camping.

Becky Clark, Editor