(Inspired by Carolyn Smith-Kizer’s “Cooking the Old-Fashioned Way” blogging event at 18th Century Cuisine [for which I am woefully late], I dove into research on the subject and soon found myself imagining a scenario where we’d lost power and were struggling to get by. I’ll write up what I’ve learned, I thought, and then determined, no, I’ll write what I imagine. What follows here is a fictional account of our first day without power. It’s early February of next year, and in this fictional world, we’re in the midst of a pandemic and we shouldn’t expect the cavalry. This is just a small beginning. I hope to follow soon with later days in our scenario, and with more failures, more lessons learned, and a deeper search into life off the grid.)
Prologue
Murmurs and preparations
“Many days you have lingered
outside my cabin door,
Oh, hard times, come again no more.”
–Stephen Foster
The world, or at least most of the world, sat up and took notice last October. Well, not exactly true. A good chunk of the world took notice a heck of a lot earlier; but in October, the U.S. uttered a collective “whaaa?” and then started paying a little more attention. (The politics of this whaa are a subject for a whole separate discussion, and really, the only thing that matters now is that we got hit and we weren’t even remotely ready.)
In October, it was all about small clusters of cases in Southeast Asia, and flocks of dead birds in Greece, and then Turkey, and then Romania. We watched as this thing crept into Europe and then Africa and asked, tentatively, you don’t think it’ll mutate will it? There’s not that big of a chance it’ll mutate, right?
Well, it did. Christmas season. The clusters were now large enough that the formerly unthinkable had become undeniable. H5N1 leapt from person to person with the greatest of ease.
By mid-January, clusters appeared deep into Western Europe, and just two short weeks later, the once green “No cases reported” map of North America had bloomed an angry red. All this, it seemed, almost at the blink of an eye — much too quickly for effective containment measures, and long before anyone could cheer a functioning vaccine or a ready supply of Tamiflu.
Here, in our tiny corner of the continent, three things happened in quick succession: rumors, more rumors, and then panic. First, rumors of cases as close as Burlington. Then, rumors of a state-wide ferry service shut-down. Next day, an island-wide run on groceries, medicines, sporting goods, and liquor. In three days the shelves, at low capacity during the off-season to begin with, were empty. In three more days: quarantine.
A week after that, we lost power.
Part one: Could be worse. Could be raining.
February 5th, 2006
It was bound to happen sooner or later. They don’t call OPALCO “Occasional Power and Light” for nothing. A few years back, a garbage truck slammed into a transformer on the mainland and the entire archipelago was dark for a week.
But, here’s the thing about being without power: We’re fine if we know it’s for a short chunk of time. A couple of days; maybe a week. I remember ice storms in Portland where we’d throw all the frozen food into a cooler, save what we could, toss the rest if it thawed, light a few candles, eat canned food, and then animate the walls with evil shadow puppet mutations and sulk when the lights came back on all too soon.
Today is different, I can feel it. Mid-morning, power’s been out for an hour maybe, and we’re hunkered around the radio searching for information. The news is vague. Something about grid instability and manpower issues, and no, they’ve no idea when we can turn on our coffee makers, our electric juicers, or our bread machines again.
This is it, kids. We’re in it for the long haul and there’s no making a run to the store for pop tarts.
We immediately launch into, if not panic mode, then at least a state of moderate scramble. First things first: the food in the freezer. (Now, I don’t know if this is the right ‘first things first,’ but it’s what we do, and hey – we’re in scramble mode.)
Chopper’s been buying meat on sale and the last thing we want to do is throw it out, so instead, we implement the emergency Casa Belly Timber Meat Triage system (yeah, I just made that up).
It goes like this:
Black Sharpie – smoke it
Blue Sharpie – cure it
Red Sharpie – eat it now
Salmon — cure, beef — smoke. Pork — smoke — wait no, I wanna make smoked sausage — label that for the meat grinder. Moon fish — we’ve got more moon fish? Um, moon fish jerky? Hey, it could work. Box of Eggos, bags of home made pasta… looks like it’s carb central for the next two days. Mystery meat… I give up. Holy crap, we still have some of that stew? Yeah, baby. That’s dinner.
We get it all sorted into two camping coolers; bags of ice from the chest freezer in each. Of course halfway through the process I realize that all this moving around of food is just going to make things thaw faster, and if we’d really been smart we would have slapped triage flags on all the meat before this shit went down. (Note to self: Next pandemic? Strategize the meat ahead of time.)
Meanwhile, on the side deck, Chopper’s got the smoker going. For this, we’re lucky. We’ve got briquettes, and we’ve even got a bucket of untreated hardwood sawdust from the lumberyard to use in lieu of wood chips. And it’s not raining.
The smoker was a serious score back in October. We’re out on Roche Harbor Road, just south of the Alpaca ranch, and stop by this thrift store. More of a junkyard than a thrift store really; gravel and scrub between herds of half broken-down ranges and refrigerators. Chopper’s plan is to scavenge parts for a smoker and go the Alton Brown/McGyver route with trash can, 3 inch bolts inside to hold a grill in place, door cut in the side with a hacksaw, pie tin for water… Then we find this thing. A whole smoker. Or, almost a whole smoker. It’s missing the bottom charcoal pan, the top pan’s got a hole in it, and one of the legs is wobbly, but for seven bucks, we aren’t complaining. Especially not when we discover that the smoker fits perfectly over our Coleman charcoal grill. It’s as if the two are made for each other.
I have to think for a minute about what we’d do if we didn’t have the smoker or the grill. Dig a steam pit in the garden, I think. We’ve got rocks everywhere, kelp on the beach just a ten minute walk away, fir branches, ferns. The fire has to burn a good long time to make the coals and rocks hot enough. Kelp keeps off the dirt and adds flavor. Dad used to tell me about this — how the Northern Straits people would dig camas bulbs and bury them in steam pits for hours, sometimes even days. I imagine we could do the same with the meat and fish, or maybe thread strips of meat onto spits of ironwood and lean the wood like a prairie fence over a low, steady fire.
Back to our modern jerry-rigged smoker, coals heating up while Chopper and I are digging through supplies for the brine. Salt (and tons of it), check. Black pepper, check. Brown sugar, check. Water —
Um…
Crap, electric pump! Pipes are still full, and there’s the water tank. Yeah, but what if there’s not enough pressure? We can drain the tank, right? With what — the garden hose? Well, does the water tank need a working pump to deliver water through the pipes? No, duh, the pump’s for the well. Jeez, do I look like a plumber? So, we have to save the pipe water, which we’ve already wasted, not to mention, somebody flushed the toilet. I didn’t flush the toilet. Did you flush the toilet? No, did you? Arrgh!
Oh, the joys of imminent lack of water.
Brief pause to assess the water situation (noting that we’ve got meat everywhere, only so much ice, and outdoor temperatures that have an uncanny knack for getting unseasonably warm on short notice).
We have:
Ten gallons in the shed.
Four bags of ice from the freezer, currently keeping food cold.
Hot water tank (44 gal) that may or may not drain out easily.
Water from the downstairs toilet tank. (Yeah, ick, but hey, water’s water.)
Also, a short walk from the house: a rather skanky pond. Also, a slightly longer walk from the house: a rather salty ocean.
Ahah. I announce my plan: Water Triage. (No sharpies this time, and I’ve a feeling “triage” is going to become both my most and my least favorite word over the next while.)
Here’s the order:
1. Drinking
2. Cooking
3. Washing
4. Waste
Not much we can do about #4, I imagine, but the goal is to find ways to move #3 to #2, and #2 to #1, ideally, without making ourselves sick. I’ve got notions involving charcoal, coffee filters and juice bottles, but first, back to the meat.
Chopper needs water for the brine. We go back and forth on this. Technically, it’s cooking water, and we don’t really want to use drinking water, but without a hierarchy of potability in place, all we’ve really got is stuff to drink and stuff to avoid. We are not brining meat in the skanky pond.
“Well, since it’s brine,” I offer, “how about the ocean?”
It’s not a completely silly idea. We can add more salt, boil it first to kill any nasty pathogens, and presto — brining water without losing drinking water.
I contemplate a walk to the beach. It’s afternoon now, getting toward dusk. The day’s been cloudy and dead still. The prayer flags hang limp and I realize for the first time I’ve heard nothing from the neighbors.
If this were summer, we’d walk to the beach past a heavily-laden crabapple tree, inviting a rich harvest and weeks of Dutch oven cobblers and fresh-pressed juice. If it were spring, we’d follow the beach trail past new stands of stinging nettles, best (and carefully) picked when they’re young and tender, then steamed or sautéed. In mid-summer through early fall, first we’d find salmonberries, then thimbleberries, then, finally, those fat, juicy blackberries — so tasty that we just might forgive their vines’ invasiveness.
Now though, it’s winter, and we won’t find much. Just quiet houses full of scared people who may or may not peek out their windows at us as we walk by. We’ll go tomorrow, I think, when I’m feeling brave. I don’t want to be paranoid. Sooner or later, I know we’ll all need to reach out, share resources, barter, care for the sick.
But today — today we just muddle through and hope that we’ve done enough planning to get by. Of course we could wake up to a warm and brightly-lit house in the morning and learn this was all just a glitch. That’s the tricky part: no one knows. We could live a lifetime with our dependence on the grid — on electricity, on municipal water, on food distribution — never tested. Or, it could all go belly-up tomorrow. Or today. Time to light the lamps, dive into the old books and learn all that we should know already.
–end of part one–
Read Part Two here.
