For weeks, it seems, maybe longer, PG&E has been telling us that they would cut the power, for safety reasons, if it got too windy. When a big wind storm was predicted – on the anniversary’s of two fires caused by fallen PG&E high-power-lines: the Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa that took out over 5,000 buildings two years ago and the almost one-year anniversary of the Camp Fire at Paradise that took out over 18,000 buildings and killed 81 people – PG&E kept their promise and shut the power off for more than 3/4 of a million people. I was one of them. The weather forecast, on Weather Underground, was for warm temperatures with no wind, so I was somewhat surprised when the power did go out. One moment, at about 11:00 o’clock at night, I was watching a movie and, snap, I was sitting in the dark, in an eerie quiet. I had the door open so Precious Mae could wander outside and because it was a warm, windless night. With the power out there was not much to do except read by lantern-light and then go to bed. Michele had gone to Napa where the power had been put out the day before and it was actually windy, so I am told, but, in Portola Valley, it was eerily still.

When I got up, the next morning, there was still no wind but it was chilly, probably in the high forties, with a clear sky. I boiled a couple of eggs, made myself a cup of Pu’er tea, and waited for the day to warm. As the day warmed I worked in the garden, in the quiet stillness. A little after noon, I showered with the warm water still in the water heater, thinking that I was glad that we hadn’t switched to an instant water heater. Then I drove the five miles to the land of power – charging my smartphone on the way – had lunch, ran a few errands, and came back to the house to feed Precious Mae. All this on a warm, still windless, day and I was getting a little annoyed. Not annoyed at the inconvenience because there really wasn’t any – yet – but at the uncertainty with PG&E saying that it could take up to five days to check all the wires in the areas that had been shut off.

I want to digress here for a second, an aside, if you will. PG&E is the worst entity I’ve ever done business with, they have all the worst attributes of a private business combined with the worst of government. They are unaccountable and imperious, their engineering division is rigid and incredibly slow – six months to run a plan check on a twenty-five house project – and their operations division is impossible to schedule having once dug up a street two days after it was paved because of their error. They are a lousy company, I almost always root against them, and I never want to miss a chance to bad-mouth them so just know that what I say about them here is through that filter. All that disclaimed, this PG&E’s fault, they got themselves into this mess. For years, they have resisted clearing trees from above their lines, according to Judge William Alsup, the probate judge in PG&E’s 2010 gas line explosion: “PG&E pumped out $4.5 billion in dividends and let the tree budget wither. ” Now they are in Bankruptcy, they fired the former CEO because she lost 6 billion and still gave her a 2.6 million dollar exit bonus. End of aside.

It was so warm and calm that I decided to go up to Russian Ridge for the sunset. I thought it might be a little windy up on Russian Ridge, but it wasn’t. It was strangely still. Walking up the trail, it struck me that I haven’t walked on dirt, an actual dirt trail, in almost a year and walking along, I realized how much I’ve missed the land. There is something about walking on actual earth that is comforting I kept thinking that I probably would not have been here without the power outage.

After sunset, my plan, if one can call my almost total lack planning, a plan, was to get dinner in the land of the power-on and then find a place to charge my computer – I had left it on and plugged into the dead circuit when the power was turned off and it was now so dead it wouldn’t even reboot – and then come back home in the dark to sleep. One thing I did do was turn on the outside lights so all I had to do was drive by the house to see if the power was on without walking up the stairs. Surprisingly, the power was on; as well as all the lights and, even the TV, that had suddenly gone out when the power was turned off. For me, the nightmare was over.

The nightmare had never even started, really, and it got me thinking about my almost unbelievable privileged life. There were schools with no power and parents scrambling to take care of their, now homebound, kids. There were restaurants and stores all over the Bay Area and in the Sierra Foothills that were shut down. There are people out of work who can’t afford it. Yeah, I know, the inconvenience, no matter how big, is much better than another Camp Fire or, even, another Tubbs fire only killed 22 people and I agree with the decision but it is a decision that cost me almost nothing.