At home, I'm most comfortable sleeping to music so before I go to bed, I turn on the radio, soften the volume, and let NPR cart me off to sleep with its classical music.
About five minutes to eight this morning, while dreaming about my friend telling me with peculiar resignation that his girlfriend was asleep, I was shocked out of sleep by a sudden sound. What followed the sound was a silence as loud as any calamity. The sudden sound was a boom, like a tire blow-out or someone tapping on a microphone. In the idiotic haze of just being torn from deep sleep, I looked around from between my two pillows feeling like I had just missed something important. With some profanity, I got up to investigate.
My radio was lifeless. The constant whir from the computer room was silenced. The furnace was unconscious, the refrigerator too. All the clocks had been lobotomized, and the handsets for all the cordless phones were looking at me with horrified bewilderment as they leaned over their inexplicably dead basesets. I had dealt with blackouts before. Old wiring causes the fuses to trip and turn off half of the house whenever a light burns out, so normally I just go down to the basement and reset the switch. However, this time the entire house was dead and no switches had been tripped. Something else was amiss.
In preparation for having to deal with someone to get this sorted out, I decided to take a shower. Maybe by the time I was done the power would be back on. Thankfully, there was still hot water, so I enjoyed a quick shower before reassessing the whole thing. I would've dismissed it as a simple blackout if I wasn't living in such an old house. Really anything could've gone wrong that would've been isolated to my house or even my side of the house.
To know just when the power came back, I switched my dead radio back on and turned the volume up. When power returned, I would hear music. I looked out my windows as my town bustled around unconcerned. Were the sliding doors at the grocery store working? Damn branches obscured my view. Any weird traffic patterns? None in particular to speak of. I saw someone in a nondescript red car stop at a telephone pole a few meters down from my house, jabber for a minute into his phone while looking up at the hardware, and then drive away. Hmm... My neighbor was on his cell phone with someone, as I could hear through the wall. Indeed, he had confirmed an outage in the area and PP&L was looking into it.
Not long thereafter, the heavy drone of a PP&L truck was rumbling outside by the telephone pole, so I figured I would watch them fix it and grabbed my binoculars to get a close look.
High up in his cherry-picker box, or whatever those boxes are called that firemen and electricians use, I saw the guy manipulating some esoteric component, tightening nuts and screws all over the thing, which looked like it could either be part of the electrical hardware or the tool needed to repair it. Satisfied with his tightening work, the guy hung it from something on the pole and began moving the box lower and away. Then with some long, yellow item that looked like a tape measure at its full extension, he delicately hooked on to the end of the component he had attached earlier.
What followed was spectacular.
"You ready?" he called down to his partner. There was a hint of childlike excitement in his voice. With that, he reared back and turned in a powerful, graceful arc, flinging the long yellow stick upwards and in so doing, folding the component from which it hung up on itself with springloaded, fantastically engineered quickness. Not a heartbeat later, the peak of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" exploded from my room in madly celebratory fervor. An entire symphony harolding him as he did, the man slowly retracted his box away from the pole towards the earth, unshaken and modest, but not without an aire of pride,
I swung the binoculars from my eyes astounded, having not yet absorbed how absolutely entertained I was. With the ecstatic singing pounding from my room, I burst into incredulous laugher, wanting almost to applaud for a good show.
It was the best morning I can remember.
Posted by Alchemae at December 31, 2003 11:50 AM