Joe Severns Allegany Magazine Winter 2006
The great blackout of 1986
While a boy in a small mountain town in Maryland, the lights went out. They stayed out for more than three days. It was Christmas time 1986, and a heavy blanket of snow covered the ground, the houses, the trees, and anything else that happened to be outside. The snow fell for more than two days, and once finished, deposited almost four feet of the white stuff. Our green and black Victorian took on a quite peculiar look, and appeared to sag under the snow. The high roof over the attic did well to slide snow off its perches with the help of gravity, but the roof over the porch was much flatter, and required my brother and me to push the snow off with big brooms so it wouldn’t collapse. Oh, the joy of snow.
I remember precisely when the power when out. It was early afternoon on Christmas Eve. My mother and sister were midway through baking cookies and breads in the kitchen, and a few minutes before the last batch was done, the power died. Every year, my mother made cookies well in advance and froze them in our deep freezer, and every year, the children would pilfer as many as we could until my mother would relent and replace the missing frozen cookies with fresh baked ones. The lack of power was met with my mother’s sigh, and disappointment throughout the house.
My brother and I had spent most of the day outside, either sledding or shoveling driveways and walkways for extra money. As normal for midday, we were home drying our clothes on the radiators when the lights faded, then went dark. Within minutes, phones were ringing throughout the neighborhood to get progress reports, or to borrow oven space from the homes that still had electricity (of which there was none). We were told to gather extra blankets and candles, and we boys did a very professional inspection of the house to make sure that the pipes were prepped so they wouldn’t freeze. We pulled the spare kerosene heaters out from our garage and set them up downstairs, and put blankets over the windows upstairs to keep the heat in. Usually, by the time we had prepared for the lack of power the power was restored. Not this time. When my father arrived home early from work at 4:30, the house was a flurry of activity, and my father inspected our work.
During the evening, friends and neighbors stopped by to chat, or to check on us. Some members of the ladies auxiliary from the Catholic and Episcopal churches checked on the local priests and pastors, and came by to collect extra food for the parishes. My mother set up the buffet in the dining room, lit candles throughout the house, and began to read from a book of Victorian Christmas stories. Family, friends, and neighbors gathered ‘round my mother in the living room of our home, huddled near the soft glow of a kerosene heater and the shimmering of various candles nearby. We boiled water on top of the heaters to provide hot chocolate to our guests, and the room sat transfixed while my mother read the story of Christmas to us all. She read that story three times that night. My father uncorked his homemade kahlua drinks for the grownups, and the children sat dreaming of what wonderful presents we would receive the following morning. Our old home was warmed by the presence of our friends, which took the chill out of the 10 degree night outside. It felt so late when we finally went to bed, but was only 10. The next morning we arose to the smell of bacon and eggs and coffee ala Dad cooked courtesy of kerosene heat. We went to church later in the morning, and prayed by candlelight, and for the first time in my life, I felt the sense of real community. A shared experience that made us all a little better. A little stronger. Everyone in our community that could get out and help did. We even shoveled off the basketball courts for a day of winter basketball, and shoveled out all the cars and sidewalks in town. We had no electricity, no TV, and no idea when the power would return, but we hunkered down and met the day with a vigor, or spirit that drove us past our petty desires and into a place where our sense of purpose and duty bound us to act.
Two days of shoveling, eating food warmed by a space heater, and neighborhood storytelling created lasting memories that fill my heart with joy.
That Christmas we may have lost the light, but we sure did find each other.