Who Turned Off the Lights?

I awoke this morning to the sound of...nothing. No space heater. No furnace pumping away. No refreigerator buzzing out in the kitchen. Nothing. Once again, we were without power. Something that happens with annoying regularity around here. Just one more reason that I really dislike living in this part of the country. They cannot - for the love of Pete - keep the power on. Almost everytime the wind blows or the snow snows or the rain comes a dropping down, so do the power lines. It's sort of like living in a third-world country.

You just can't count on the power. And yet this is not a third-world country. In fact, it's not even one of the poorer parts of this country. No, this is one of the richest and most expensive areas in the good old USofA, yet they can't keep the power on. In this place, I pay twice as much for electricity as I have ever paid anywhere else I have ever lived. In fact, I not only have to pay for the electricity I use, but I also get the privilege of paying to have that electricity delivered to my house.Why? Because the company that delivers the electricity is not the same company that makes the electricity. Why, you may ask, soesn't the company that makes the electricity just deliver it themselves and cut out the high-priced middle man? Ah, well, these are not the kinds of questions that one asks. That way madness lies. And all of this is extremely maddening to me, because I spent most of my adult life in the west - in Idaho, Washington, Montana, North Dakota. You know...those really backward states out in the hinterlands, where all theey have are a bunch of cowboys and Indians running around and there are no services of any kind. Living out there, I experienced, on many occasions, blizzards of apocalyptic proportions, when the wind blew with hurricane force, the temperature plummeted to well below zero, and the snow piled up into drifts two and three stories high, and they had to close down the interstate highways and the rail lines become inpassable. But, ya know what? I never - never I tell you - in all the years I lived out there, during all of the blizzrds that I went through, lost power even for five minutes. People out here tell me - when I relate this - that they must have buried the power lines. Nope. The power lines out there are strung from poles just like the ones out here are. The phone and internet lines are buried, but not the power lines. What they did was something truly radical. The power companies actually maintained the lines out there between the storms. Cuz, see, they have this funny notion out there that folks might actually need to rely on power during the winter, cuz maybe they heat their houses with electricity, and it might be kind of important to make sure that said electricity keeps flowing to the people who are paying for it. That doesn't seem to be something that worries the power companies out here too much. On my way home from church today, just on the road that leads from the freeway to my street, I lost count of how many places where I saw snow-covered tree limbs actually laying accross the power lines. Hadn't broken them yet, but they were certainly putting pressure on them. All it will take is one really good heavy wet snow fall, like the one scheduled for later this week, and one of those branches will take down the lines, and we'll be in the dark again.And where was that blasted company that charges me such an exhorbitant price to deliver my electricity? Well, I guess they had better things to do than cut back those branches before they take down the lines. So it won't be long before I wake up again to the sound of silence.