1/15/98... Kaczynski Zone.

I had been perusing the Unabomber's Manifesto shortly before the lights flickered and went out... and we plunged back into the preindustrial era. Like the testing of an addled hypothesis.

It started sleeting Wednesday morning. Seth had a mid-afternoon flight out of Logan, and we were glad to drive out of the frozen precip into a hard rain south of Biddeford. Seth got off to Boulder via Houston, and the holiday season officially came to a close. I got back on the road north without ending up in the new Ted Williams Tunnel, or getting MASShed.

The farther north I went the colder and slicker it got, and the slower the traffic. Miraculously, I didn't see anyone acting out on ice. No hellbent hustlers, no brakestomping babushkas, no line-cutting loonies. By the time I got to Bowdoinham the traffic was doing 35 in deep slush, and I was glad to be home. It was coming down hard.

We lost power in the night, and school was canceled, but by 7AM the lights were on again, and it looked like ordinary storm outage. Somebody skidded into a pole, maybe. We usually have a spell or two each winter, when we dig out the candles and flashlights, stuff the woodstove.. but we're rarely without power for more than a few hours.

Thursday was one of those stormed-in days. A glaze of ice everywhere outside, and Peggy puttering happily on projects by a hot stove. I'm trying to figure out the next step, which puts me in a semi-comatose state.. web surfing, book dowsing, card reading, anything to avoid the issue. In desperation I was doing a landscape from slides to keep from narcolepsy, when the power dipped, surged, dipped, and quit. Dull gray light seeping into my silent shop. Just enough to finish coloring the portrait of Chico's pickup, with plow and sander attached. Too apt.

The waiting begins. We forget how plugged in our hurtling civilization is. When the power goes out life becomes suspended animation, waiting for the line crews. It's absolutely still outside. A steady downpour is freezing on every surface as it hits. I essay a few steps out the back door, and am on my ass in a flash. The last faint gray light squints down. We cook by candlelight.

I feel like reading aloud, and take a flashlight to the bookshelves. We each have our personal flashlights, and the sense of exploring in a familiar house is evocative. Why do we insist on filling night rooms with light? But what to read? After we finished reading the Patrick O'Brien series aloud, nothing has seemed epic enough for recitation. I poked and prodded until I came up with an undeclaimed Kenneth Roberts, ARUNDEL. Perfect. Arnold's winter march on Quebec. And we spend an hour in colonial Maine, drinking buttered rum by a roaring fire. Then we fall in a heap. How quickly we return to the hibernation schedule of the pre-electric age. To sleep by 8 PM.

When visual reality returns, the world has been transformed into a gloomy dripping nightmare. It's still raining, but the rime of ice has thickened into a heavy coat, and the trees and shrubs are sagging under the weight. Every least twig has a sheath of crystal growing on it. The cherries in our tree are fat glistening balls.

Chico backs his rig up the drive, flinging out sand and salt behind him to get traction. I spraddle out to jaw, and our breaths steam in the downpour. I wave a twenty at him.

"You don't owe me anything," he says. The deal with the town is that plow contractors can take town sand for local driveways, so long as they don't charge for sanding.

"I know," I reply. "Just take this so the next time I owe you, I won't." I figure Chico needs the cashflow as much as the rest of us. He's going to need gas and coffee for a while yet.

"It's a mess out there," Chico reports. "If you don't have to go anywhere, don't." And he skids back onto Rt. 24. The Owl looks like a hummock of ice anyhow.

As Friday progresses, we begin to hear the trees coming down. Pines seem to be the first victims. Their long horizontal branches with terminal sprays of needles give the ice too much leverage. A sharp cracking breaks the air, then an explosion of ice on ice as limbs strike ground. Soon the woods are full of rending agonies. The maples' vaselike architecture makes their forking vulnerable, and they are shedding like summer dogs. Then all the trees yield to the loading. It sounds like a war zone out there. Any hopes that this will be a short outage evaporate.. er, freeze.

Life is reduced to essentials. Hewing wood and hauling water. Actually we had a pile of dry ash behind the stove, and the town water district put a generator on the standpipe pump, so we never lost H2O. I tiptoed out to the shed and retrieved our propane lantern, dug out the crampons I used in the Magdalen Islands, to secure my footing. It all comes back. How Louis McPhail helped me forge these spikes over a coal fire in his parlor. How enclosed winter life was in the maritimes. Our months with Coleman cooking and no electricity in Grande Entree. The years without plumbing and insulation in Jonesport, when life was dedicated to keeping the fires going and our spirits up. Bad hair days, bed hats and socks. The layered look.

Speaking of bad hair, Kaczynski contends that technological civilization is destroying personal liberty. He says that taking care of our essential needs through our own efforts is empowering, while modern life reduces us to helpless cogs in an industrial mechanism. We've ceded control of our lives to the corporate structures, and many of us will be run over by the juggernaut. "It would be better to dump the whole stinking system and take the consequences."

Well, here we are in the Kaczynski Zone. Do we feel empowered? Yes and no. It feels good to be able to ride out the storm without anxiety. To be able to take care of our simplified needs. If this situation were to persist, we could no doubt go back to the hand-to-mouth subsistence we practiced downeast. But, frankly, I'd rather not. It is tempting to envision disconnecting from the grid, but with solar panels, please.

We hang a blanket over the hall doorway to hold the heat downstairs, and the house cools down slowly. The outside temp is close to freezing, so it will take a while for us to get all hunched and shivering. I worry a bit about the water lines against the north cellar wall that I've got wrapped in heat-tape. But it will have to get a lot colder before our plumbing is at risk. The stuff in our fridge and freezer will go, of course, but they aren't full of truck this year, fortunately. Our world continues to contract. Peggy has schoolwork spread out on the kitchen table and a relaxed look, but I'm too restive to sit and muse.

I strap on the spikes, put on foul weather gear, take ski poles and the dogs, and thrash into the woods. Falling limbs make us jump and scurry through a maze of arched boughs.. trees making obeisance to the ice gods. A dripping world. We break out onto the river bank, and a drizzling mist obscures the opposite shore. The dogs slip and stumble as I stride across the flats ice, reveling in surefootedness on a slippery plane. By the time I tromp home it's dark. Northern winter hours.

I go next door to check on the two young women and the little boy. They have no heat and only candles for light. They've pulled all the furniture together in one room and are snuggled together there. I suggest they come over and share our stove heat, bunk down.. but they are shy, and insist they'll do OK. We still have our phone, and everyone is calling around the local net, checking up. My father says the neighbors are providing him with emergency power, not to worry. And it's still coming down and freezing.

Silent night, except for the trees cracking and limbs crashing. Chico's generator rattling down the hill. In the morning it's STILL icing, and we are resigned to a long siege. Chico keeps spreading sand on the drive, but it slicks over almost immediately. I spike and skipole across the glacier to Jeanine's and Marion's for news and a few groceries. Jeanine has a gas grill, and is serving by candlelight. She's mobbed with local trade. At the grocery they are handing out flashlights to shoppers, and are already out of batteries and candles. I had thought to power a radio, but wasn't too upset to find I couldn't. Word of mouth seems just fine for storm news.

I think about how the islanders used crazy Gary at Old Harry as a storm crow. Gary was the local drunk and village idiot.. probably a paranoid schizophrenic.. but he had an important role in the settlement. When he started dancing on the capes everyone knew there was bad weather brewing. I have to wonder if our latter day Luddite, Ted Kaczynski, isn't a weather sign for the global village. Our crazed storm crow. His warnings about the possible collapse of technological civilization may seem laughable ravings now, but what if we are triggering environmental debacles? What if this ice storm is a forerunner of things to come. Ted Ludd bears a eerie resemblance to another psychopath we refused to heed. John Brown. One of those truth-telling madmen?

"Unabom Kaczynski lies amouldering in his grave..."

Phew. You can hear all kinds of voices in the stillness. And we sure aren't used to the silence. No fans and compressors in the background, no 60 cycle humming, no NPR. Only the sound of your own brain sizzling. Spooky.

I spend much of the daylight hours chatting up neighbors, looking for something useful to do. Annie and Russell are somewhere in Texas, but they called the women next door from the road and ordered them into Annie's trailer, where there's a woodstove. I poke my head in at Chico's to find that it's 80 degrees in his doublewide with everything going full bore. Funny how you end up inside your neighbors houses at a time like this, when you'd never go in otherwise. Chico has a collection of miniature glass dolphins he wants to show me, and his wife, Pat, has lined the walls with shelves of Country vinyl. Merle Haggard is her hero. They spent the summer collecting semi-precious stones along river bottoms in the Carrabasset Valley, and Chico has mounted a hundred or more of them into pendants and ear-rings. I try to buy a set of turquoise ones for Peggy, but he insists I take it.

"We'll work it out," he says.

Now that we're resigned to hunkering down, people with backup systems are taking in their neighbors, helping friends. We supply water to some folks, and invite others in for hot air and dinner, offer them beds. We've got these defrosted chickens to eat up, after all. Mr. Mann and I drum up the dusk as Theo plays a sultry kazoo. Peggy sketches a replica of the Unicorn Tapestry for a school musical. Marsha and Fowler trade tales. We feast on what's in the cupboards.

Crazy Ted does seem right about technology and community. I'd probably be roaming around in cyberspace, solo, instead of laughing and scratching with friends around the fire. Crises inspire community action. Does this require bomb-throwing to initiate? Or are we all throwing bombs into the ecosphere?

The volunteer fire department is out doing rescue work, and trying to open the roads. Trees and power poles are blocking access everywhere. Times like this I wonder if I should join the local crew. It's awkward to simply stand and wait. Not that we stand up long. Everyone goes home, to houses heated and un, and we are tucked in and snoozing by 6 o'clock. Imagine. And it's still icing.

It stops raining in the night. Full moon glittering on a crystal planet. The big maple that looms over our drive has shed limbs onto the powerlines and the drive. There are four big branches hanging on wires within sight of the house. The brief ride I took with Hank yesterday, to feed his mother-in-law's animals over east, showed us that every road is as bad or worse. I've already forgotten what day it is, and am getting used to the disconnection.

Four thirty AM there are flashing lights outside and a two-man crew with a cherrypicker is sawing limbs off the lines. Takes them about twenty minutes to clear the lines out front. Slick work, levering lines around with the bucket, cutting the branches, tipping them over. Right behind them a connection crew goes past. At 5:30 we suddenly have power. Crank that furnace.

We're lucky to be on a main trunk. The rest of town is still dark and hanging. Most of the rest of Maine, to hear tell. But even with the juice on, I'm spinning wheels. Mr. Mann helped me crack open the Owl last night after we chipped off his Hondacar, and today we venture out after supplies. Once on the interstate it's almost like modern times, and the supermarket at the mall could be anywhere, except for the joviality. Hey, we're out, and there's lights on.

I decide to try and get through to my folks in Litchfield, to see how they're faring, and I fill a couple of 5 gallon pails for them. When I start the Owl, he roars. I must have run over a limb in the drive or backed into the stoop unloading.. in any case I've sheared the header pipe. So I hotrod north.

Trying to get up the Post Road proves to be a bad idea. It's still closed due to downed trees, and I photograph the fire department boys unsnaggling a big snarl. A couple of guys with a cherrypicker are just ahead of me, and they get dragooned into helping. It takes me a minute to realize that they have commandeered the truck. They have no safety gear aboard (they borrow hardhats from the fire dept.). Obviously on their way to do a little private rescue work. Brent pointed out to me that he'd probably have power pretty quick, because there is a lineman who lives just beyond him on the grid. This is still individualist America, of course.

I back up, and varoom up Rt 201 instead. Not much better. The ice damage gets worse as you go north, and I have to zig and zag to get to Ross'.

They're fine. The neighbors have all pitched in to help. Ross and Carolyn have rolled up the livingroom rug and built a fire in the fireplace (unused until now), they've assembled an altarpiece of candles in front of a mirror, and have a garage full of water buckets. The guy next door has run a cable from his generator, and backfed it into their furnace circuit, so they have oil heat part of the day. And they seem to be enjoying the sociability of it all. They don't even have a phone working now. We share tea and finger food, and I motivate for back.

For us the worst is over, and it begins to feel like a two-tier society. The Withs and the Withouts. The early enthusiasm that comes with novelty is wearing off for some people, and flashes of impatience are visible. If Ted Ludd thinks Americans will graciously give up their technology, he's been out in the woods too long. Those who work outdoors are doing fine, and primitives like Buzz are in their element, but the rest of us want to get on with our lives. Voluntary meditation is one thing, but enforced stillness makes your ears ring. Voluntary simplicity sounds good until you want to take a shower. No, Ted, we aren't ready yet.

Peggy actually had school on Monday, a bit prematurely as many of the teachers and kids had woodstoves to nurse and other crises to manage, but Freeport was less hard hit, and getting back in the groove was probably a good call. The power only inched north about a mile on Sunday and Monday, as crews were still mending major arteries, and we're at the end of the pipe. But I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Wind.

After the icestorm we had two calm sunny days. The sheath coats came down like hail, and the trees sprung back.. at least part way. The big branch resting on our roof arched away. But there are widowmakers everywhere. Severed limbs hanging precariously. When the wind does come up we're going to have to face outages all over again. Heads up.

It starts to blow Monday night, out of a clear full moon sky. At 3AM Peggy jumps up crying, "There's a fire in the house." Our bedroom is full of bright firelight, but it's from outside. A branch has fallen across two live lines and is arcing, ripples of fire running along the wood. Then it goes incandescent. Like a gigantic lightbulb illuminating the neighborhood. Astounding. It burns for long minutes before it breaks in two and falls to earth. The power goes out at 6:30.

That's the way it's gone since. On again, off again. We are finding our footing slowly. Have we been chastened by the Kaczynski effect? Probably not. We know where the candles are, certainly, but are we ready to "dump the whole stinking system?" Not yet. I went out and surfed the web again last night, only feeling a little guilty at my technological access. Stay tuned.