In the Dark of the Night

I

After a shower in the evening, I look for the hairdryer. A wind chill warning in effect, I don't want to walk the dog with wet hair even under a hat.

My hair is long and takes a long time to dry. I'll blow dry it a little and wait. We have time.

As I stand in the bathroom at the mirror, I disappear. The apartment is torn from the world.

I move like a blind woman through the rooms, searching for candles. At the window I do not see any lights, except distant cars. I phone my son at work. The grocery store where he works part-time has its own back-up generator.

Darkness retreats from the candle flame, leaving small globes of golden light.

II

Our apartment is heated electrically. Base board heaters line every room, and every room has its own thermostat.

My daughter keeps her room at 10C; I like mine about 22C. We keep the apartment at 17C. Tonight we plunge into frigidity together.

III

As the temperature drops, holding a candle, I look for my soft-fabric snowpants made by the Sundown lady who lived on Toronto Island and ran a cottage industry making warm bright down coats for babies, children and adults. She knew how to make coats for Canadian Winters. The snowpants are as warm and supple as they were 20 years ago when I bought them at her little store in a house on Richmond Street.

Or perhaps I am already wearing them when the lights go out, I don't remember.

IV

The first night is slightly exciting. Bravo and onward. My son insists his room in the basement is warm, and I go to sleep on my bed fully dressed, with wool socks and the snowpants, two down covers and a huge faux-fur coat from the late 1990s.

I talk to my brother who works nights for a couple of hours, till perhaps 2am.

The air is cool and yet faintly damp, like there is a cold fog.

Do I sleep? I don't remember.

V

My daughter is out of town, and I'm glad. In the morning I discover we have hot water and make a drink out of chickory and barley and a drop of table cream, something akin to coffee.

When I go downstairs to wake my son for his classes, I am overwhelmed by the smell of gas. He's alright. Upstairs my old Northern Telecom phone that's plugged into the jack works fine. I call the landlord and am on hold for 5 minutes before I hang up, find the Consumer Gas number and call and report the smell of gas. Men are here within the half hour, and they are downstairs about that long before I am asked to sign a form saying that they discovered one of the water heaters was leaking gas and so they turned off the gas and capped it.

This team only responds to emergencies; they don't do repairs. That's another appointment and another team.

Is it my hot water tank? Mine is the only new one of the four in the basement, having leaked last Summer and been replaced.

It's too dark to tell.

I don't know.

VI

The power failure and the leaking gas are two unrelated events. It is a bad day.

VII

At some point I sleep in my nest of a bed with its layers of covers. I don't know when, but wake groggily.

By then, my son is home, having missed his first class due to the bus service taking the place of the subway that isn't running due to the power failure which occurred because a major transformer station was flooded.

Flooding and heat.

Like my heart.

VIII

I buy a coffee at a Second Cup that has just had power restored. It's patchy, who has power and who hasn't.

My superintendent lives a few blocks away and though his house is in the blackout grid, he had nonstop power. He's sympathetic. He's glad I called the gas company. Because each of us rent hot water tanks for our units and pay our own heating bills, he says he can't put in an order for Consumer's Gas to come and fix the tank that was leaking, the tenant has to. We don't know who the tenant is.

In the roulette, it could be me.

IX

Fully weather-proof, I have only to put on mitts, hat and jacket to walk the dog. The neighbourhood is empty, save for a few other women walking their dogs.

It's unnatural.

X

I send updating tweets out over Twitter that go to my blog and to Facebook and friends there leave comments that come back through my email.

Obsessively, despite my cell phone being nearly dead. I siphon battery power from my netbook to feed the cell phone which gives me internet connection.

I feel dislocated from the world. Yet without lights, computers, TV, radio, the hum of electically-powered living, I am located in the world that is the world.

XI

Evening, and the inner temperature drops. The apartment is getting colder. I am wearing my full-length faux-fur coat with the hood on all the time now. I am shivering.

I call my other brother, who isn't home, and my mother, who forgets what I'm calling about and talks about the bank books she has for all of her grandchildren.

I phone a "warm house" and am told they can send a car round to pick up my dog and I right away. Thank you, but I'll wait and see later in the night. Okay, you have our number.

My son's friend phones to offer us warm refuge at her parents' place. She is very sweet. He and I are more comfortable with family, though. We'll wait for my brother, his uncle, who will surely rescue us.

He doesn't.

XII

Severe weather bulletin. A wind chill warning in effect. Temperatures are between -20C and -30C. Only 25% of homes originally affected by the power outage are still without power. That's us.

Warmth! Heat! Wherefore art thou?

Inside is like outside without the wind.

It's like winter camping, without the tent heater or the fire. Late one Christmas about 30 years ago I was in a bachelor apartment in a rooming house that had lights but no heat. The landlord and his partner had gone away and hydro cut the heat. I remember this particular type of coldness, its fog-breath. The ceiling cracked and paint fell all over the apartment that night and I broke my lease and moved within weeks. I put some of that broken ceiling paint in the journal I wrote, didn't I.

I sit on my bed wrapped in layers of clothes and the large coat under two down sleeping bags, my dog in a fleece coat beside me. I'd be gone if it wasn't for the dog, to a friend's or family or even a coffee shop. My breath is foggy.

My son will not leave. I am determined to stay, too. I buy a thermos-carafe of coffee while he picks up pizza. We eat by candlelight. He says he's tired and makes his way downstairs. I don't want him down there and to his protestations insist I will check on him later.

XIII

I only know this. I struggled and then lapsed into meditation, deeper and deeper, intoning a mantra, finding layers of calm beneath the water flooding the transformer station, finding what I'd forgotten, when, flash, the lights blinked on as if they'd never been off. The world began. Again.

___
When a Hydro crew arrived at the Dufferin transformer station, a relay station that turns high voltage electricity into usable energy in our offices and homes, they discovered dangerous flooding. The station was filled with water up to knee level and rising. They immediately cut power to 100,000 homes in Toronto. Power was restored gradually over the next day or so as they pumped the station and dried the electrical components. The blackout began around 10pm on Thursday, January 15th, and power was fully restored around 9:30pm on Friday, January 16, 2009. In the last area to be restored, we were without power for nearly 24 hours, a severe wind chill warning in effect for our region throughout.