Puerto Rico from space after our most recent blackout
January 7, 2020
Like the great Britney Spears classic (and a personal guilty pleasure of mine) Mother Nature gave us an "oops I did it again" moment as a belated Christmas gift, when early in the morning of January 7th 2020, the island shook, shuddered and went black. We are used to tremors in Puerto Rico. On average, over 500 times a year, our daiquiris are shaken by Atabey (the Taino mother goddess) rather than a suave Puertorican bartender, and life goes on. Our homes are built for it. And although they appear to defy gravity and engineering as they cling to cliffs, mountainsides and dells (if all goes right) they are cantilevered into granite and quite safe. Case in point: 3.1 Million people, one death, 17 injuries, and at my last glance less than fifty houses damaged. And most of those were creepily intact-- merely askew like the Monopoly house teetering in a tornado in The Wizard of Oz.
No. The big issue as usual was power and water. A plant on the southern coast, which was built in the 1950s and produces about a quarter of the island's power, went awry; forcing engineers to do what engineers do best. Find a solution and find it fast, which in this case meant rerouting, rewiring, and re configuring our moribund electrical grid like the Griswold's putting up Christmas lights. (But more on that in another blog.) In this blog I'm going to talk about Coxsackie, New York.
In the early 1940's my uber urbane Auntie Carrie and her engineer husband (my Uncle Joe) left New York (by way of Minnesota) and alighted in the tiny town of New Baltimore in upstate New York-- although we never referred to it as that. For us it was always "Coxsackie" (the nearest riparian town on the Hudson). I won't even try to explain how Climax, New York fits into this conglomeration of place names, but it suffices to say that even as a teenager I was amused by Climax and Coxsackie being in such close proximity.
The house was a former inn, toll house and way station where it was not uncommon to awake to 56 degree days (Fahrenheit not Celsius for my European and Canadian readers) on July 4th, and where the concept of heat was reduced to a stove the size of my first car (a Chevette), electric blankets, a fireplace (with a questionable draft) in the living room, and a half-dozen kerosene stoves hauled out for the times that room would be used between November and May. It took eight hours with those stoves at full blast to get the living room anywhere approaching 60 degrees.
If the lack of heat was not enough to deter visiting Coxsackie, the lack of water should have sealed the deal. Washing dishes was an exercise in careful planning and excruciating patience, since I believe Burgoyne's horses sapped the majority of the water out of that well sometime in the summer of 1777-- and what water you could coax from the tap was brutally hard and sulfurous. Pots and pans would dissolve in cratered pits with the mildest of scrubbing. Bathing was best left to sponging, since a shower would require a third of an average trip of four days. A bath would probably have taken a week-- but I never tried it.
The moral of the story is my that aunt and uncle loved it. The kerosene, the wooden chairs, the impenetrable cold, the endless drafts; and I learned that not so very long before I came along, people a mere generation before my parents' thought ice boxes (with real ice) gas lamps and space versus central heaters were normal (even luxurious) and were quite happy about it. When our power goes out here, I arrange our emergency candles room by room, move a gallon emergency water jug by the sink in our bathroom, put the mop bucket under the downspout to catch rainwater for toilet flushing, wrap the ice packs in the freezer in a towel and move them to the refrigerator in a covered pan with salt, and recall being taught about washstands and chamber pots; how to fill and trim lamps; and cooking on gelled alcohol by my mother and my aunts.
I won't say I don't miss electricity and and running water when we don't have it, but it doesn't panic me. For me its like sitting in the warm glow of the kitchen in Coxsackie playing gin with my father after dinner by soft lamplight as my mother and aunts struggle with water to wash and dry the dishes. I guess, since at one time the water wasn't even in the house (the remains of the manual pump were not far from the former privy in what used to be the kitchen and service porch off the back of the house) this was downright luxurious for Auntie Carrie, since one of the first things they did when they bought the house was turn the pantry into the bathroom and a sitting room into the kitchen.
Its all about perspective. For Auntie Carrie and Uncle Joe Coxsackie was not deprivation-- it was romanticism. And that is why I will always be grateful for Coxsackie, New York.
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