Day of the Walking Dead

When we think and talk about the comforts and security of home, we take an awful lot for granted.  We  enjoy enormous luxuries unavailable to anyone, anywhere on this planet, at any time up until the last few generations.

Storm Nemo is over, and the power is back on here at my house.  250,000 people across Massachusetts are still without power, most of them within 50 miles of me.  Recovery efforts are in full gear and will bring most of us back on-line quickly.  There are people living on Staten Island whose power still hasn't been restored two months after their disaster.

The power was out for only 24 hours here in many parts of Duxbury and Plymouth and Cape Cod.  Some places didn't lose power at all, but everything stopped.  Everyone huddled around their fireplaces, grateful for having one, and invited neighbors without one to come over.    

I am profoundly grateful this morning, reminded deeply of the benefits of our modern power and electric distribution grid.  I recently read The Lady in Gold, about the Gustav Klimt painting of a Viennese Jewish woman whose family had everything and a great number of their everybody taken by the Nazis.  It's amazing the luxuries that Vienna had created and built for themselves by around the turn of the 20th century, and profoundly sad how much they lose to great evil and the plunderers of legitimate wealth.  It's also amazing, and worthy of reflection, how much we consider "normal" that they didn't have at all.  

My son was nearly immobilized by a lack of internet.  Tragic, huh?  The older people in my home were more concerned about the falling temperatures.  Our house was 40 degrees inside before the electricity clicked on again at 10:35 p.m. last night.  We are lucky.  People we know who live nearby don't have power yet.

Duval Patrick is in Plymouth right now, extolling the good work done and being frank about the work to be done.  He's doing a  very good job, as are all the agencies working together to alleviate peoples' basic concerns.  The governor imposed a travel ban that was very, very effective in assisting road clearing and keeping people safe who would otherwise have had accidents, needed police, ambulance and hospital services, or simply become stuck in snowbanks that needed to be cleared for everybody's sake.  The public roads are very well plowed.  I commend the Commonwealth for great preparation and excellent execution.  Massachusetts did a great job of keeping people safe, and minimizing the damage and hardship imposed by nature.

At 4 p.m., that ban was lifted, and I'd heard that there was power in Hanover and Hanson, a few towns north.  My son and I drove north, toward Boston, looking for pizza.  I didn't expect any: no businesses were open in the absence of electricity, and in the presence of three feet of snow and hurricane-force winds.  One supermarket was open, but there wasn't any hot food available and the half-empty and unkempt shelves reminded me of what I'd been told about Soviet grocery stores under Communism.  Things can and do fall apart quickly when the underlying structures in our lives undergo stress.

The towns were eery in the half-darkness of impending dusk.  No one was out.  Businesses were dark.  It made me think of the post-apocalyptic visions presented in The Walking Dead and Zombieland, without the zombies, or the Twinkies.  The news called this SnowPocalypse, which just makes me cringe.  That's an enormous and silly exaggeration, and I'm getting tired of these punny compound words that people crush together.  "Urmagerd", as my son's now says.  That's high school jargon for what the last generation of high schoolers called "OMG".

My son's back on the internet.  I'm going out to check on some neighbors.  The guy next door lives alone.  We'll be fine, but consider: what will you do when the lights go out?