Family On The Lam, Again…

Or, “It’s All Fun and Games Till Your Whole Town’s Power Goes Out for 36 Hours and Your Nieghbor’s Trees Come Crashing Down On Your House.”

Oh what a pleasant corner of the world we’ve chosen to cast our lot in. In retrospect, which it finally is, it could have been much worse. There could have been the breaking of nearby levees or trees falling directly on our house or car, instead of near misses like the one below (our little red car was parked right next to the tree).

It all started Friday. We knew were probably fucked ahead of time. All the old salts were warning us to prepare for outages. What they didn’t tell us was how long they would last. 36 hours? Fucking a.

Wake up Friday morning after a storm straight of out the Old Testament all Thursday night to find the neighbor’s tree laying prone next to our cute little Red Car. Foolishly think “Whew, we got off easy!” Take the Man Cub to daycare to contract his next booger-borne baby virus but find their power is out. I decide to leave the boy there anyway, with instructions to call me if their power doesn’t come back by midday. Still leave feeling like a shithead.

Driving home, there’s Christmas trees blowing across the middle of the streets like tumbleweeds at the OK Corral. Giant trash and recycle cans tossed around like kids’ blocks. The shithead feeling only gets worse. But Goddammit, I’m on deadline for four newspapers, two websites and a huge freelance project that dropped in my lap that needs to go live this coming Friday. Shithead. Shithead…

Anyhow, I’m not at home too long before the lights start bobbing and weaving. I back up frequently and work as fast as I can. Just the same, sometime after 10am – blinko. Everything but my laptop goes tits up. The world is a mighty dark place with the apocalypse brewing outside, power dead inside and your boy 10 treacherous, dangerous miles away. Did I mention the huge semi sprawled on its side driving home from daycare, blocking five lanes of traffic with the cops just arriving on the scene? I curse myself again for not having had my camera ready. Shithead!

With the power out and the storm only gaining fury, I decide I need to go get the boy. If it’s the end of the world, I want to spend it with flesh and blood. I head back out into The Shit and make it back to daycare, taking all surface streets. Trees and large debris everywhere.

I get to daycare, and every other shithead parent in town has decided to leave their kid at daycare, too. Far from feeling better about myself, I feel renewed contempt for my fellow residents of this pissant hellhole burg. I collect the Man Cub and we drive home, surface streets all the way, dodging fallen trees, emergency vehicles and gusts of wind hard enough to force course corrections at 30 miles an hour.

We finally get home in one piece, and once again I foolishly think, “Whew! The worst is behind us now.” Not long afterward, there’s a big crash from the back yard and the Man Cub, who had been glued to the back glass sliding door, comes running up excitedly, yelling “Tree! Tree! …” I don’t see anything from the back, just general end-of-the-world chaos. So I head into my office and am genuinely surprised to find a different neighbors’ tree brushing against my office window:

I realize that another gust of wind will blow the heavy branches off the overhang that had kept the treetop from crashing into my office, so I go out to remove said limbs with the only tool at my disposal, a battle-worn machete from my time with the French Resistance. Chopping those limbs down was the highlight of my weekend.

Eventually, it’s too damned cold in the house, so the boy and I split for The Missus’ office at the university, thus far unscathed by the power outage that has eaten the rest of the city. I’ve lost my sense of humor about the whole thing now and don’t bother to bring my camera.

A couple of tense hours later we’re back home and freezing, but decide to stick it out. I mean, hey, it’s 2008 for crying out loud. How long can it last?? So we light candles and put all our D batteries in the boombox and pass the night with Johnny Cash and Dean Martin. It’s times like this you really realize what is important to you.

By morning it’s fricking freezing and the decision is easily reached to find a motel with working electricity and go live there till the power comes back. We know of one down the street – it was the same place we escaped to the last time horrible weather forced us from our home since we moved up here. 40 years, I’ve never been chased from my home; in six years up here it’s happened twice already.

So we go to the nice motel with rockin’ internet access and dog-friendly policy (not pictured: the dog):

Go out for a dinner that is both horrid and over-priced. There was more beef in The Missus’ vegetarian ravioli than there was in my veggie-beef soup. She was quite the trooper.


I, on the other hand, had achieved a Zen state of bliss by this point and was torturing the help for sport. When the ‘hostess’ seated us directly next to the bathroom in the almost-empty eatery, I innocently inquired, “Pardon me, do you think you could seat us closer to the bathroom? I have a weak bladder…” Nobody but me thought that was very funny, but I found it funny enough for everybody. Our poor server was this sweet, gay undergrad with bad skin, working the local crap franchise in this little crap town from hell down the street from our crap town from hell… We didn’t screw him on the tip, even after he tried to poison my wife with beef products.

So the night was long and largely sleepless (for me), all four of us packed into that one smallish motel room. The boy thrashes — Clump, thump, rustle... The Missus coughs. The dog gets up and walks around, smacking his tail into everything. I keep feeling little tickles at the back of my throat, desperate not to cough out loud and wake everybody up. It occurs to me, I probably wouldn’t have made a very good settler.

The next morning, the word comes that power has finally been restored. Not word from the power company, nor the stupid kid next door I had tasked with informing us when the power came back on, but by a reliable friend (thank you very much, reliable friend). Not a minute too soon. There’s only an hour between “Meet The Press” and “ABC Sunday Morning” and we’ve already wasted fifteen minutes of it. We pack frantically, pile everybody in cars and head home. Even with the time required in having to plug in and re-program every electronical gizmo in the house, I don’t miss a minute of George Stephanopolis’ ABC Sunday morning politics confabble! Life is getting better already.

I even have time to write a note and stick it on the door before The Missus and the Man Cub come home from breakfast at our town’s nicest breakfast place (I filled up on Mountain Dew and giant cinnamon doughnut earlier in the morning).

So that’s our story, and we’re sticking to it. We didn’t learn any lessons and nobody cried; in some ways, it was just like an episode of “Seinfeld.” Only with more wind, rain and inconvenience. And frankly, considerably less comedy (my routine at Marys House Of Inedible Crap notwithstanding). Why does this shit always have to happen during key political news cycles and when I’m on deadline for everything??