Orcas Island goes the extra mile to keep us residents flexible! When town is already quiet from a pandemic, and political news is keeping us on our toes, we awaken one morning to silent machines and black digital clocks.
Power outages in wintertime are a thing here. You never know when they’ll happen, and you never know for how long. All of a sudden, a tree’s gone down on a line in a windstorm, shutting off power in your neighborhood; or electricity’s gone out on the mainland, shutting all of the islands down. School’s closed, work’s not gonna happen, and your brain makes a complete shift – card games, anyone? It’s a big step back in time, and I can’t say I dislike it. As long as it’s not for a week!
It happened day before yesterday, and miraculously the sun was shining so our walk to school became a family walk once we learned school wouldn’t be happening.
This is what a day without power looks like…
It’s still quite dark at 7:30 AM, and without power there’s not much to do but get dressed and go see the world outside. We don’t have cell service, so we can’t even get any updates – we’re completely incommunicado.
When we got home our younger son asked if we could do a bonfire with veggie dogs and s’mores. I had a few errands I wanted to do on foot in town, so we put our walkin’ shoes back on and headed to the store. With no power, shops are closed and dark inside. Island Market is one of the few places with its own generator. During the last major power outage, all of their cold items had to be thrown away after a day without refrigeration. It was awful. Now that they have a brand new massive generator on the side of the store, they’re the big show in town – the only place that’s hoppin’! The rest of town is absolutely desolate. Beyond pandemic. Unlike anything you’ve seen before, especially for a sunny day. It’s like a nuclear fall-out feeling – everything’s intact and not a soul is around.
Now stocked with dogs, marshmallows, and graham crackers, it’s time for a bonfire…
And cat portraits, of course. The big entertainment.
And more cat portraits. Can you tell that time is of no consequence?
What’s funny about power outages is the realization that the rest of the country is continuing on in its busy-ness. We islanders are the only people slowed to a halt. People elsewhere are still working, still schooling, still bustling around – well, in their pandemic-adapted ways. We, on the other hand, experience this odd pause in time. Nothing can pull at us. Nothing can say, “You should be doing this or that.” We can walk for hours, bonfire until sunset, and literally be in every moment.
So much so, that after a few hours of dogging and s’more-ing, our older son pulled out of his quiet fireside contemplation, lifted his head, and said, “I hope school happens tomorrow. I can’t just keep doing this.” I laugh as I type this. It sure makes you appreciate the pace you normally go when you have no idea how long you’ll be forced to slow down even more – island life combined with pandemic times would be a lesson in extreme adaptation for a newcomer here. Imagine if you moved here during an outage!
When the cat tires of posing, it’s on to branding…
With the sun setting – around 4ish! – there’s an urgency to get inside. The house has been cold all day, and fire needs to happen inside too. Candles need to be lit before it’s dark. Thank goodness we got the second-to-last pack of matchboxes at the store.
Our younger one puts out the bonfire while the older one helps me carry the food in. We discuss the need to take cold-ish military showers, only turning the water on for several seconds in between soaping and shampooing. We conserve the warm water that’s left in the hot water heater in case the outage should last for awhile. Then we huddle up together near heat and light, in our cozies.
Dinner during outages is always simple – peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, apple slices, and whatever food just happens to be around.
I love seeing what’s happening out in the world, even if I’m the only one there. I had this urge to go into town to experience the eerie blackness. And complete blackness it was. I could not see a thing while standing on the sidewalk in the middle of town. This is a photo of what it looked like at the three-way stop near Darvill’s Bookstore.
I just bought our older son’s iPhone 11 from him for its camera (my first cell phone ever! – but not for cell service), and it has a night mode setting in which any ambient light is picked up by the lens, slightly illuminating whatever happens to be nearby. It takes 3 seconds or more to take each photo, holding very still. The following images only have light because of the ambient glow of Island Market’s lights a block over. As you can see above, in real time everything’s completely dark. It’s like time exposure photos you’ve seen of mountaintops at night – you can see the whole scene because the shot was taken over several seconds or even hours, and the white snow itself illuminates the shot over time. In real life, you can barely make out where your feet are.
I’ve photographed Eastsound in deep snow (and here too), but never in complete darkness. Town usually looks like a magical little place you’d see in a shake-up globe. For this one strange night, it was surreal to walk the streets and barely be able to see where I was going.
The museum 
The Village Green 
In the middle of the street near the Village Green, looking toward Darvill’s 
The sculpture in the mid-town park near Tres Fabu
Even stranger is to walk one street over and down to the corner. The market is like a blasting lightshow in comparison, and cars fill the lot, coming and going for quick food, hot food, any food, a chance to see light, and a moment of human connection before returning to dark, cold homes and bedding down early for the night in order to stay warm.
Aisles of brightly-lit produce are so normal to us, but during a power outage when your eyes are accustomed to the dim, candle-flickering light inside your house, this kind of scene is borderline psychedelic.
The hot food cases are completely empty, as are the shelves of artisan bread.
I even saw two people plugged into the store’s power to try to get work done on their devices. I’d never seen that before. More than a few residents probably passed by the library at some point during the day to see if their WiFi was available for gleaning. We did. It wasn’t. The place was dark and there was no booming of a nearby generator.
Back at our house, we were getting quite comfy with the whole thing. It’s a completely different level of thinking and living together. A feeling that has its own magic that most people never experience – even though they could at any time, at the flick of a few switches and the lighting of a few matches.
And in an instant, everything went on! The smoke detector sent our dog in a fleeing frenzy, the lights beamed, and the refrigerator droned on. Our very sentimental younger child jumped out of his sleeping bag and set about turning every electrical thing off that ruined the moment, and we decided to finish out the night the old world way, falling asleep by the fire.
Such a good description of what it’s like! When I was a kid in Missouri, we lost power for 3 days after a snow storm. Our cat crawled into a sleeping bag and pretty much stayed there for the duration.
I think our dog thinks we’re nuts. One night we’re watching 60 Minutes with all the lights on and cooking all kinds of food. The next, we’re huddled by the fire in the dark with apple slices!