Motus Mentis

One of the hazards of living on the Outer Cape — an ephemeral sandspit that juts thirty-five miles out into the moody North Atlantic — is the occasional ravaging by violent cyclonic storms, especially in winter. These Nor’easters have driven ships onto the Cape’s eastern shoals for centuries, and sent thousands of hapless sailors to Davy Jones’ locker. (The sea-beds around here are littered with their bones, and the old graveyards crowded with their cenotaphs.) Every few years these vicious storms come when the temperature is low enough for snow, and when that happens we get some of the fiercest blizzards you’ll ever see anywhere.

We’re in the middle of one right now. The charming little town of Wellfleet, where I live, is being absolutely hammered by this massive coastal storm. The Wellfleet PD, in an email update earlier today, said there had been “widespread destruction” of trees and power lines. Electric service is out everywhere, and because you can’t send crews out while the storm rages — which it will be doing until tomorrow sometime — I’m sure it will be quite a while before it’s restored.

Having had quite enough of this over the years, about eighteen months ago we decided to put in a generator: a sturdy eighteen-kilowatt Generac machine, powered by a five-hundred-gallon propane tank buried in the back yard. We haven’t had a prolonged outage since, but it has cheerily fired itself up for a self-test every Monday morning at eleven, and its stouthearted presence gave me the confidence to view the approach of this monstrous storm with equanimity.

You can imagine, then, how chopfallen I was to wake up at seven this morning to a howling blizzard and a lifeless Generac. (Without electricity, among the other obvious inconveniences, our oil-heat system doesn’t work, and we have no running water. We also live on a small hilltop, with a steep, curving driveway, so fleeing in the car was not an option, even if the local roads had not become, as Chief LaRocco reminded us, “impassable”.)

I wondered if we might have run out of propane – but the stove, once I lit it with a match, still seemed fine. So out into the blizzard I went.

The generator was well-buried in snow. I cleared it away and chipped the ice from its louvers and vents, opened the lid to get at the controls, and — Lo! — it started. I went back into the house, and — nothing.

There followed several hours of investigation (I knew basically nothing about the details of how this thing had been spliced into our electrical system.) I tried various resets, alternate settings, checked its fuse and various breakers, but got nowhere: it was purring away but not delivering power to the house.

Finally it dawned on me: the problem was a faulty automatic-transfer switch behind the inner panel of the box in the basement. I was able to override it manually, and power began to flow. We should be good now for several days at least, if we keep consumption low. (God knows how long it will take to get the mains back, but our local utility company, Eversource, is as good as they come.)

Meanwhile, it’s dark outside now, and the house is shaking from the wind. The snow is still coming down hard, and will be for many hours yet. It sounds like the town is pretty badly smashed up already, with more to come.

It’s easy for affluent Westerners to forget how fragile our security is, how dependent we are on a brittle infrastructure that can break down at any moment, and how puny we are compared to the titanic forces that swirl and crash all around us — but every now and then we get a little reminder. (A non-fatal one, if we’re lucky.) We would do well to pay better attention.